The New York Times is reporting that in the recent crash of a Germanwings plane in France the pilot was locked out of the cockpit. It suggests he was trying his level best to break the door down to get back in. Obviously he did not succeed.
Someone on another website (sorry, I cannot find the page again) said that one of the main news networks had a pilot on and he said there are several ways to gain re-entry to a cockpit from the outside but did not elaborate.
Another claim I saw was regulations say there must always be two people in the cockpit. If a pilot leaves one of the cabin crew has to go sit in the cockpit.
Yeah, I know I do not have citations for this which is why I am asking here. What is the reality?
Can a pilot leave the cockpit?
If a pilot leaves does another person have to take their place (not to fly but just to have two people up there)?
If a pilot leaves and the person in the cockpit won’t open the door (either through disability or intentionally) is there a way to open the door from the outside?
Seems to me that the drawbacks of hijack-resistant doors may outweigh the benefits, especially since hijackers could be killed by passengers and crew in the post-9/11 era. But that may be a shortsighted view.
I had to laugh. The post-9/11 reformers thought they were* so smart!*
Hey, you want to know how to stop a bunch of lunatics from killing everyone on an aircraft? Here’s a thought: You handle them if they arise, instead of making flying a plane more dangerous than it intrinsically is.
Seriously, though, hardened cockpits–while suicidal in the horrible and unlikely incident that one pilot has a stroke while the other is in the head–were still better than the “shoot guns in an aircraft at altitude” suggestion.
Of course, they wouldn’t tell you and me about it, but from these latest reports, they must not have told the pilots about it either. That makes me think this isn’t true.
Plus, if there is a trick to opening the door, that would be a huge security hole.
IIRC this would not be the first time when a pilot was left locked outside the cockpit by the other one in an air plane.
If that report is correct it confirms what I feared was a big flaw about the idea of securing the cockpit door as it is done now.
There is clearly no good way then to deal with a case when one pilot gets incapacitated or just willing to die while the door can only be opened from the inside.
I would suggest adding a communications channel outside the cockpit that allows direct contact to the control tower and once a positive id has been done of the pilot and the situation has been understood a remote unlock system together with a special key from the pilot outside the cockpit should be used to gain access to the cockpit.
There is also the suicidal pilot possibility. An instance that for whatever reason one pilot decides he/she is going to end it all and take everyone with them.
What’s wrong with requiring another crew member (flight attendant) to enter the cockpit before the pilot leaves? Every US flight I’ve been on since 9/11/2001 does this, although I freely admit I have not been on every airline.
Why would someone who is intent on taking out a planeful of people allow it to just crash into a mountain, as opposed to someplace more spectacular. Also, why did the plane slow down in the last instances before the crash?
My theory is the lone pilot left in the cabin had an accident, either a medical situation, or more likely got knocked out by, for example a hard bump to the head (by being a klutz) or a falling shelf.
However…
Did this plane not have Wi-Fi? I would think that if a pilot is banging on the cockpit door to get in, that pretty much the whole plane would instantly know about this and some people would be using the Internet to inform other people.
IIRC the rules are that the flight attendants have to stand guard outside the cockpit. Not very useful if the remaining pilot decides to lock the door by ignoring or just pushing the attendant aside, and then it seems to me that it would be a rule that is easy to get around.
I don’t know what the rules are, but in practice in the United States a flight attendant goes INSIDE the cockpit while another stands guard outside. Then the pilot comes out and the door is locked.
Sure if the remaining pilot is a suicidal maniac, he can kill the flight attendant. But why wait? He can just as easily kill the other pilot and not bother with getting him out of the cockpit. But in the case of a pilot who becomes incapacitated, the flight attendant inside the cockpit can then let the other pilot back in.
Even if this is not a legal requirement, it seems like a very sensible procedure that would cost nothing to implement.
It appears to have been implemented in the United States.
Well, the thing is that I have seen how the procedure goes in an Airbus, but I cannot find a reference to a flight attendant taking the place of one of the pilots in the USA.
I thought that you or somebody else would know of a good cite, so far on the news I only have seen pundits but not actual knowledge of what is being done, so far it seems that not all airlines do it. And it would seem to me that the attendant standing guard outside the cockpit makes sense as having an attendant in the cockpit in place of a pilot is actually increasing the risk, not only in security but by the attendant being unaware of touching stuff or making a mistake.
I fly business class routinely (and first on occasion) – in all the instances the pilot has left the cockpit, a F/A entered the the cockpit until the pilot returned. I’ve never seen a F/A “stand guard” outside.
That is ok, but in the other thread now **Alley Dweller **reports that 2 F/A are involved, one inside the cockpit and one standing guard. This is getting confusing, or the most likely explanation is that this can be happening in some airlines and not others.
I do think that this incident will make more airlines to follow procedures like the one you and Alley Dweller describe.
To clarify: One FA stands blocking the aisle with a food cart (not directly in front of the cockpit). The other exchanges positions with the pilot coming out of the cockpit.
In our company, not European or American unfortunately, a flight attendant must be in the cockpit while the other pilot is out. Additionally the curtain is pulled close. I don’t know if the procedure is to comply with a regulation or if it is simply a company policy.
Our flight deck doors are also less sophisticated than those described above for the A320 and can only be unlocked from inside the cockpit.
If this latest accident is a result of pilot incapacitation then at least two things have to have happened, the pilot must have become incapacitated and he must have first put the aircraft in an un restricted descent. He also must have set the cockpit door to “LOCK” (assuming jezzaOZ’s info is true.) If it was simple incapacitation the aircraft would have continued flying at altitude until out of fuel.