I’m really surprised the airline let him continue training. There’s a reason you screen out people with a medical history. This is the reason.
Pilots are (eventually at least) well paid. The high pay is not for flying the plane. It does most of the flying. The high pay is for the skill of flying the plane when shit happens. It takes a very level head. I can’t see where someone with mental problems should be flying a plane. It’s not a position that can tolerate second guessing someone’s state of mind on any given day.
On another note, not that we’ll ever know, but one of the Mission Impossible movies opens with a similar crash, terrorists lower the automatic flight-level of an airliner so that it flies into a mountain range, maybe it gave him the idea for this specific means of bringing an airliner down among the many possible methods.
On a side note, I really think that pilots on regional and local commuter airlines should still be earning very good money - maybe $50,000-$80,000 rather than the low wages they currently make. It would be a remedy for many issues currently plaguing the aviation industry. Sure, such pilots aren’t protecting the lives of 200-300 People on Board every time they fly, but they’re protecting the lives of 50-150 People on Board, and that’s almost as critical, no?
The copilot could not afford to live where she was based, so she lived with her parents in Seattle and commuted by hitching rides to New Jersey. Article.
I’d rather have a pilot who wants to be a pilot, and one who makes a living wage so s/he isn’t fatigued. $16,000/year isn’t enough.
Uh, you may recall that it didn’t actually work out that well when the passengers did that on 9/11. The plane still crashed. It didn’t hit its intended target, but everyone on the plane was killed.
Also, I don’t think it’s incredibly wise to rely on untrained civilians to handle a terrorist emergency. Most of them won’t have combat training, or even martial arts, they may not even be that physically fit, and they don’t have the psychological or strategic training to successfully plan and carry out a military-style mission. A group of Air Marshals might have a shot; but there’s never a group of them on any given flight.
At least with the five-minute lockout, the legit flight crew can keep the bad guys out of the cockpit long enough to call for help and get the plane pointed toward the nearest airport to land. Keeping to a “Rule of Two” for the flight deck would help prevent a rogue pilot incident. At least, the rogue pilot would have to fight / incapacitate the other person in the cockpit before he could take over, which would buy time for other flight crew to get in and subdue him.
I remain skeptical that it could have been planned. It was a two-hour flight; the odds that the captain would need to pee weren’t high enough to be something he could rely on. More likely, I think, it was opportunistic. He realized that he was alone on the flight deck, and that he could make sure that the captain couldn’t get back in to stop him. Basically he succumbed to the Imp of the Perverse.
This is unreasonable. MOST people are going to have at least one serious episode with grief of some sort – people die and eventually it will be someone you were close to, relationships break up, etc. That doesn’t mean that it’s an indication of serious problems in the future – most people will recover just fine given time and self-care to heal.
It also doesn’t account for people who have a history of clinical depression, but have incidents of remission that last for years at a time. Not everyone with mental illness is a ticking timebomb (in fact I’d say “ticking timebomb” is a fairly small percentage); and many are perfectly capable of managing their symptoms and understanding when they should take steps to remove themselves from work, if necessary.
I think the failure here is that Lufthansa apparently doesn’t require on-going psychological assessments. That’s foolish. Mental state changes constantly for everyone. Your most stable, upbeat pilot may be devastated when his mom dies, or his wife files for divorce. Life happens, but that doesn’t mean people are incapable of recovering from it.
Company support for people going through stuff should be available too, so it isn’t an added stressor to get grounded. If you know the company still has your back and will help you get to a point where you’re allowed to fly again, people will be more likely to self-report when they need a break – their entire career won’t be riding on keeping their problems to themselves.
Threatening to permanently ground someone for a single incident of mental distress – any incident at all – is going to actively discourage people from self-reporting. Oh, I feel like I need a month off to grieve the passing of my mom, but if I ask my boss for time off they’ll fire me and I’ll never work again, anywhere, ever – you think that won’t lead to people tearing up sick notes left and right?
Unfortunately, this sounds like a surefire way to ensure that pilots will try their best to hide mental disorders, perhaps letting them fester and grow even worse, untreated, rather than having their mental state become known and lose their jobs.
Kaio: I don’t think the suggestion is a ‘one-strike’ for mental distress. As you say, there are life events that are distressing. It is the obligation of the pilot not to fly unless s/he’s fit to fly, and these temporary calamities do pass. But someone with a diagnosed ‘condition’ should be looked at very carefully. Yes, conditions can be managed with medication. But would you want a PIC who is ‘off his meds’? Diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions can be controlled; but I understand the process of regaining your medical certificate in these cases is very arduous.
That’s a danger. But it’s also a reality for many conditions.
It could be a combination of both, the idea may have already been there and he seized the opportunity when it presented itself.
The fact that he had told his ex-girlfriend that he ‘was going to be remembered’ suggests it was more than a simple spur of the moment decision. Though granted that statement could have meant anything, we’re only retrospectively applying it to what he actually did, though its equally possible that he meant exactly what he said.
Is it practical for the autopilot normal law regime to overrule a pilot trying to set the system to a crash? Surely a computer can calculate that a set setting of 100 feet in the Alps means death?
Maybe, when ground terrain warning sounds (“Ground Proximity, Pull Up”), it would physically put the plane nose up?
Yes, don’t ground someone because they’re sad that grandma died. That’s normal.
Lubitz suffered a “serious depressive episode,” took a break from his pilot training in 2009, and spent about 18 months getting psychiatric treatment. This is someone with clear mental illness. He should have been grounded.
There would be edge cases of mental illness that would require a judgement call but it’s better to err on the side of caution that putting people’s lives in the hands of a potential timebomb.
I am not a pilot (or any other relevant profession) but it seems to me that unless you propose that a computer control the entire flight (in which case, why have pilots?) there is no point to adding further complexities like that to the system that themselves have the potential to malfunction. If the suicidal pilot can’t redirect the autopilot into a mountain, then he just turns it off and does it manually or redirects it out over the ocean, or does something else lethal but outside the parameters that can be over-ruled by the autopilot.
This plane, the Airbus A320, is entirely fly-by-wire. I heard today that the pilot cannot manually or otherwise cause the plane to fly outside of its “envelop.” This would explain why this pilot didn’t just point the nose straight down to crash it; the plane would not allow it.
Which would be what on-going evaluations are for. They have twice-a-year medical assessments, why not for mental health too? I’m not suggesting that someone with poorly managed bi-polar or panic attacks be allowed to fly. But I think this idea that any form of mental illness automatically equals unfitness is more stigma than anything else. Remission from mental health symptoms can last for YEARS – even without medication. It depends on the particular character of someone’s condition. Pilots can be evaluated for how often and severe their symptoms are, and how capable they are of managing symptoms and recognizing when they need to self-report and take a break. They can also be evaluated on a regular basis for developing symptoms that they haven’t reported – just like you would for someone developing heart disease. But I don’t think it serves anyone to make assumptions about fitness without those evaluations.
Assuming that every mental illness manifests with severe, unmanageable, dangerous symptoms is just misinformation and stigma. Real life isn’t a Hollywood movie. There are lots of people who are perfectly functional.
Not just regaining the certificate - keeping it with one of those conditions can also be arduous.
The FAA examiner I did my private pilot checkride with was a commercial pilot with diabetes. He wasn’t going to work for the airlines (Class two medical, for those who know what that means) but his work still required a certain level of certification. Wasn’t easy for him to keep in compliance with the FAA requirements, but if he wanted to fly that was what he had to do.
On the upside, he said he probably never would have lose his excess weight and started regularly exercising if the FAA hadn’t made it a requirement - he most likely was healthier on account of it than he would be otherwise. Keeping flying privileges can be a very powerful incentive to comply with requirements.