Whoooo boy… Apparently, the copilot had been diagnosed with severe depression, and at one point was labelled “not suitable for flying.” This was at Lufthansa’s own pilot training school.
Looks like Germanwings/Lufthansa didn’t have adequate precautions in place to make sure that they didn’t put a suicidally depressed pilot on their planes.
I’m guessing a bankruptcy filing by Germanwings (or at least a reorg involving a name change) will be coming in the very near future.
I’m just joining this thread and I didn’t read the previous pages (sorry), but this question came to mind when I was reading about this in the paper this morning:
It seems like the whole scenario depended on the co-pilot being alone in the cockpit, but how could the co-pilot be sure the pilot would leave the cockpit at some point during the flight? It was a pretty short flight. If it was pre-meditated on the part of the co-pilot, he would have had to ensure the pilot left him in there alone–maybe he handed the pilot bottle after bottle of water to drink?
But if the pilot leaving the cockpit to pee was spontaneous and unexpected… then one is forced to wonder if the co-pilot’s actions were spontaneous and unplanned, too.
Not that it changes the horrific outcome or even makes much difference…just a curious point.
ETA: Just saw this on Politico.com:
The odds that the pilot would leave the cockpit on any particular flight might be low enough that you couldn’t plan on it happening. But he could count on being left alone on some flight.
Since that was planned anyway, it seems likely.
Pretty sure they fly a lot of the same routes over, and over and over. It may simply be that this is what the captain always did.
Not that it really matters. It may have been a spontanious unplanned action on part of the co-pilot.
This is interesting… so if the co-pilot had it in mind to do this thing, he might have just been waiting for the next time he was left alone on SOME flight, ANY flight-- didn’t have to be this one. I don’t know why, but that is especially chilling…
According to German authorities,
“Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz ‘should have been on sick leave’ on day of Flight 9525 crash and hid illness from employers”
They have not mentioned what illness it was, but it seems that he was not supposed to be flying on the day of the accident.
Exactly. A depressed mental patient alone in the cockpit deliberately crashed the plane. End of investigation.
Lufthansa did not take action even though they were previously aware of his mental issues. The head of Lufthansa immediately went into cover up mode with this “100 percent flightworthy” crap. They should be sued out of existence by the families.
So anyone else wondering how much good-faith effort the malaysian authorities did investigating the MH370 crew?
I can see how the airplane vanishing would be a better mass-murdering course. Lubitz parents must be going through a living nightmare. Fortunately it’s a bit more difficult to do the vanishing act over Europe without a Mirage on your tail.
I think you are misinterpreting the reporter. Here’s what IMO they meant:
THAT’s what was meant.
The “supposed to” doesn’t mean some administrative screw-up put a guy who was already on sick leave in the air that day. It means that had the copilot followed all the regs, he wouldn’t have been there that day. In fact he wouldn’t have been employed at all.
This is starting to look a lot like Federal Express Flight 705 - Wikipedia ; a guy realizes he’s about to lose his career for circumstances beyond his conscious control, panics, and does something really, really awful.
So, the copilot was supposed to walk into his supervisor’s office and say, “Uh, boss? I forgot to tell you that I’m crazy. Can you please fire my ass?” That seems rather naive. Certainly a major first-world airline has better pilot screening than that.
They do, don’t they?
Dunno about the Malaysians, but there were like 9000 countries involved in that investigation, so I’m sure the pilot was pretty well investigated by someone.
In that case, I’m leaning toward the theory that a fire or decompression or something incapacitated the crew, leaving the plane to wander off into oblivion. The pilots seem to have had enough time to turn around, but not enough time to do much else.
I concede that the news of this morning about Lubitz’ medical condition/note from a Doctor makes this idea less likely, but I still want to question if he could have had a stroke and still had some voluntary control. It seems some strokes can affect impulsiveness.
Almost everyone has some personality quirk. A lot of hindsight analysis is just that, hindsight.
If you disqualified every single pilot who ever showed signs of sadness or anxiety or nervousness or difficulty focusing or a short temper or unhappiness or impatience or sullenness or carelessness or too much focus on detail or silent withdrawn-ness or cold/harsh facial expressions…you’d have almost no pilots left.
I agree about the rush to judgment. The Lufthansa CEO blamed the co-pilot within 24 hours of the crash. I could see the media jumping the gun, but why did the company?
I’m trying to think of how the co-pilot could have made the pilot leave the cockpit. Pure speculation that it was somehow engineered. Maybe spill something in his lap?
Or did I miss something that indicated why the pilot got up and left?
Maybe they had a quick turnaround in Barcelona and the captain didn’t have time to hit the head? Or maybe Lubitz just made a spur-of-the-moment decision upon finding himself alone.
Perhaps the CVR made what happened more indisputably clear than news reports so far have indicated. Spohr is a pilot himself and wouldn’t have disparaged another pilot if he wasn’t pretty damn sure.
Last couple of small-plane suicides I heard about the plane wasn’t stolen, it was rented. C’mon, Richard, you and I both know that for a current pilot all you need is a credit card/some cash and maybe a 20 minute check out if you haven’t flown out of that airport before. If you’re a regular customer you might even be able to fly first and pay after you’re done.
Keep in mind that a pilot’s association exists for the benefit of pilots - they’re going to want to keep this from turning into more and more onerous restrictions on pilots.
While psychology is probably a factor we can’t be sure that was the actual trigger. He may have come down with some sort of physical illness that would end his flight career and responded with denial then suicide. If he had some sort of cancer, deteriorating vision, a neurological problem, heart disease… all sorts of things can end your flying career and might have had little or no other job skills or experience to fall back on.
Even for private pilots being permanently grounded can be psychologically devastating, for commercial and professional pilots even more so. Add in some tendencies towards depression…
Why not?
These days pilots in something like an airbus can program the airplane to do the work and barely touch the controls. Maybe he wanted to close eyes instead of seeing the ground approach. Maybe he wanted to look at the sky and clouds instead of steering the airplane. We may never know.
They could have been spontaneous. There was no suicide note, we have no idea if he planned to kill himself or not when he took off that morning. Maybe it was a spur of the moment impulse due to a chance opportunity? Again, we may never know for certain.
As for why the captain had to pee so soon after take-off? Who knows? Extra cup of coffee that morning? Prostate troubles? (I had a friend once who had to deal with that for a bit until he got the problem straightened out - he had to take a bathroom break every hour, flying with him was like trying to go somewhere with someone eight months pregnant, you had to know where every damn toilet was within 1,000 miles). Underwear adjustment?
The only jurisdiction that matters is Malaysia’s. But to be fair, maybe the investigation just stalled, without a clear motive and/or evidence.
Most likely the co-pilot with a psychological disorder didn’t plan to do this during this particular flight, but at this particular flight he found himself alone in the cockpit, perhaps unexpectedly, steering this jet all by himself, with all the power to do as he wished with it and with his life, and perhaps impersonally thought, “now is the time, this is the moment”, and did what he did.
I could have happened sooner, it could have happened later – or it may not have happened at all. Chance has a much bigger influence on our life than we like to think, especially when it comes to disasters.