That’s three extremely unusual aviation disasters in a year’s time.
First MH370, then MH17, now this.
I would prefer to think the pilot in the cockpit had been incapacitated, perhaps by a fast-developing electrical fire that overcame him with smoke before he could react any further than to put the plane into an emergency descent. I would have thought a suicide dive would be faster, steeper, and apparently less controlled than this one, and might have been into the water to eliminate evidence. But it’s happened enough times before that it’s a real possibility here.
There would probably be yelps or sounds of surprise by a pilot seeing fire or some other issue, though, wouldn’t there?
If someone wanted to disguise a suicide crash as an accident, might he “talk for the black boxes” - say words simulating an onboard emergency? Make a fake Mayday call (“Mayday, Mayday, decompression”), make fake shouts of distress or alarm?
Of course the cockpit needs to be secure against terrorist passengers. But it seems the solution worked too well. Now they need a means to ensure that a lone crew member can’t lock out the others should he turn suicidal. Why not entrust the lead flight attendant with a physical key that is hidden in the galley? Or put an emergency radio in the flight attendant’s station that would allow them to request a signal to be sent to the cockpit to override the door lock? I think technical solutions wouldn’t be that hard to implement while at the same time preventing a repeat of 9/11.
I don’t think being suicidal removes one’s distaste for frightening situations. It’s my understanding that a crash happens quicker than the body’s ability to perceive it. So the pilot just had to set the plane to descend and then sit there knowing that he’ll be dead before he feels any discomfort. Going straight down would have the same physical effect but has the disadvantage of being terrifying.
Along these lines, I would also postulate that on an airplane, the “good guys” will always outnumber the “bad guys.”
So if you have an easily opened door, yes, a few hijackers could more easily break in, but many passengers, FAs could even more easily break in to subdue them. And if there’s 1 suicidal pilot, there are many more non-suicidal FAs and crew to break in and subdue him.
A pilots’ joke is that the last words a captain should say before a crash are “What the hell are you doing?”
The flight data recorder will show the positions of the controls, control surfaces, and other aspects of the flight. He can claim there was a malfunction, but if the FDR shows that he was holding the stick forward or chopping power to the engines - and if the post-crash investigation shows that the plane was working fine when it hit the ground - then it will cast a lot of doubt on his claims.
Then all the terrorist needs to do is hold a knife to the FA’s neck and they will probably open the door for them.
That puts a lot of trust in the flight attendant (FA), who’s had much less training and physiological and psychological assessments than the pilots of most airlines. Pilots go through years of expensive training, being assessed along the way for psychiatric issues. An FA could have access to a cockpit after a few weeks of training, and no airline is going to risk the bad publicity of putting a crazy in there with access, or pay for the extensive assessments that pilots go through.
The emergency radio in the FA’s station comes up against the same issues.
The same issues are faced if you replace, for a short bathroom break, the Captain or Copilot with an FA. I believe most cockpits have an axe to facilitate exit in a hard landing, who’s going to want a new FA with access to an axe to sit behind them while he/she is operating an airplane?
My opinion is the old system of having a Captain, Copilot and Engineer in the cockpit is the safest. You’d always have two in there at least, and so if one goes FUBAR the other can either take control, open the door or press a panic button which opens the door and sends a signal to the ATC. It’s not inconceivable that the pressing of a panic button could also override the auto pilot on/off switch, levelling out the plane to a safe cruising level.
Edit: And what Richard Pearse said.
Maybe not in this case. The impact was so severe that it separated the contents of the FDR from the casing. The casing has been found but not the recorder. The CVR is barely recognizable in the photos.
That assumes that all these people could stay on their feet while the person at the controls banks and dives and that once they got into the cockpit, they would know how to fly the plane and have enough time to pull it out of a dive before it hit something. It might not hit the ground, but what about that mountain up ahead?
I’d think that if the pilot was frantically pounding on the cockpit door, one of the passengers would have noticed, and, perhaps, made a goodbye call to his/her family. (But perhaps in the French Alps, cell service was poor?)
And a few years after 2001, I was on a flight sitting in row 1 or row 2. When one of the pilots exited the cockpit to use the bathroom, the flight attendant parked the beverage cart across the aisle in front of the bathroom door, so that if someone tried to rush the cockpit, would be stopped or delayed by the cart.
Not after 9/11. Before then, most hijackings were for escape or ransom. Now, they are very likely to be for a terror-murder or elaborate suicide. Even serial killing of passengers and cabin crew would be preferable to having the whole plane downed, possibly into a populated zone.
“The cold equations.”
Another idea- give the pilot and copilot remote control entry keys to the cockpit which can’t be overridden. Before the flight, the techs on the ground make sure the keys are programmed for the door for that particular plane. Pilot leaves the cockpit, he carries his remote with him.
The CEO of Lufthansa (a pilot by training) just specifically denied such a policy in a press conference saying that it was not the normal procedure in Europe and observed by relatively few airlines worldwide (which I guess means American ones.)
9/11 ruined the hijacking industry. Passengers won’t cooperate with hijackers ever again, or at least not until 9/11 ceases to be such a cultural touchstone and shared memory. I wonder if the fortified door provides better security than the passengers would, but it’s certainly a complicated issue (fortified door means that it’s much harder for terrorists to gain access to the flight controls, but it also means it’s much harder for passengers to storm the cockpit if some evildoer does gain access).
Terrible; cell service is sketchy on the ground and non-existent at above 3,000 feet.
Now pilots turn on the seat belt signs, so the toilets clear and everyone is sat, when they need to open the door and take a leak. No chance of having a toilet in the cockpit, and you don’t want an unlocked door when you’re flying alone! The code to open the door was overridden by the young copilot, which seems like a bad idea - leaving one pilot alone and able to lock any access. Sure a hijacker could take a box-cutter to the throat of the pilot when he exits the toilet, so there’d have to be some sort of procedure where the pilots can lock the door in that case. Maybe an FA with an emergency button? IDK.
Do pilots also get regular psychological tests? I don’t think they need to be required to go to weekly therapy, but maybe having psychological tests when they have medical tests would be a good idea, to check if they are in possible depressive or suicidal states. Or maybe therapy have required therapy sessions if they go through any major possibly traumatic events, like divorce or death of an immediate family member.
Imagining a suicidal pilot is scary, but a fast-developing electrical fire is equally or maybe more scary, since there are a lot of similar planes in the air.
Yeah, it is possible to think of a more complicated security procedure, but there will always be a way around it. It sounds like the current set up isn’t perfect, but works pretty well in most cases, except for possible exceptions like this one.
Yeah, that does seem strange that no one got a message out, but I could see it possible that there was no cell service and no Wifi on board. I wonder if it would be possible to recover any passengers’ phones and see if anyone tried to send messages out.