7 ms·

Germanwings Tragedy: How to protect against mentally ill pilots?

58 points by ivank 12y ago

ptaipale 12y ago
I like that comment about crash axe vs. two quarters and a dime and a set of car keys. However, this one I disagree slightly: "Could this crash have been prevented if a flight attendant had been in the cockpit? “No,” is the short answer. " The presence of a flight attendant does not make it impossible for a determined suicidal co-pilot to crash the plane. Heck, even the presence of captain doesn't. But while you can physically destroy the plane even if someone is right there, in the case of a mental disorder it is more difficult to do it. The presence of another human has an impact on you.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Agreed - In california, a lot (most?) of the gun ranges will not let you go by yourself, you need to have a buddy. Now, obviously there is zero ability for a bystander to prevent you from doing something harmful with a firearm, should you chose to do so, but the mere presence of someone else, radically reduces the chance that you will do so.
  - fnazeeri 12y ago
    Source?
    - corin_ 12y ago
      I only have an anecdote, but I had a day to kill in LA a few years back, and really fancied going to a pistol range (never tried - only used a shotgun here in the UK) - Googling and phoning all the ranges I could find within the LA area I couldn't find any that would let me go without somebody else with me (I was out there alone for work).
    - ghshephard 12y ago
      I have a number of friends who are huge gun fiends, who are always hounding me to go with them so they have the second person. This is just for handguns, long guns, for some reason, don't have that requirement, and allow you to go out on the range solo.
shiggerino 12y ago
>If he can’t earn close to $150,000/year he won’t be able to pay this order, in which case he will join the roughly 1 in 7 child support payors who are imprisoned at some point for nonpayment (for not paying the court-ordered amount, Massachusetts offers the pilot a felony conviction, which means he won’t have an ATP certificate anymore and therefore won’t be able to work again, plus up to 10 years in prison). It doesn't help that the United States still has such medieval instruments as debtor's jail. While more civilized countries have programs in place to help debtor's with counselling, restructuring and suicide prevention, the United States debtor's jail system makes sure you'll never get out of debt, and that you'll die in debt. Never mind that the creditor won't get what they are owed under this system. Never mind whether the creditor even exists: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/02/15/woman-jailed-late-video-return/5512821/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/02/15/woman-jailed-l...
- SeanDav 12y ago
  I have no idea if the USA has a debtors jail or not, but I don't think this is about going to jail for being in debt, it is about going to jail for breaking a court imposed order. The court order could have been about a restraining order, in which case you go to jail for breaking a restraining order. This does not mean that the USA has a jail specifically for any possible violation of a court imposed order.
  - mattmanser 12y ago
    Which is for non-payment of debt, which is debtors prison.
  - mg1982 12y ago
    It's a distinction without a difference if the court is ordering you to pay money that don't have and can't get.
  - bayesianhorse 12y ago
    The US doesn't have debtor's prison per se. Only certain kinds of obligations, which are already associated with "jailable" offenses can result in something that looks a lot like debtor's prison. In some cases not being able to pay a debt really should carry a jail sentence, for example in case of clearly fraudulent behavior. John Oliver talks about a particular kind of "debtor's jail" in a recent episode of "Last Week Tonight". It seems though that appeal courts don't look favorably on such jail terms.
amix 12y ago
I think this could be prevented by removing humans from the cockpit and let computers take over. Computers are already controlling most of the things inside an airplane. If this isn't possible, then the flight software should at least have protection against malicious pilots (this would protect against the mentally ill and also against terrorism (e.g. 9/11)). Basically, the planes could have failsafes to prevent malicious pilots from crashing them down or crashing them into things.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Ya Get rid of the persons involved...i.e. Self flying planes. It will happen eventually, it is a much easier problem than self driving cars, and there are already planes that can take off and land themselves in certain conditions. But this isn't really a huge frequent problem, just one that gets a lot of press.
  - acqq 12y ago
    Why stop there? The best way to get rid of persons involved is not flying the passengers. Until then, having the human pilot capable of overriding the computer is actually a good thing, see danieldk's comment. That the computers should help the humans as much as possible is indisputable, but it's a gradual and hard process to bring the real improvements.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      In the long term it's ineveitable, juist like self ddiving cars are. Computers are actually very suitable for this. Today, ya, maybe not yet, but we are definitely close. Flying is a hard job on humans, the hours suck, the job can be very monontomous. The problem isn't that the pilots are evil/bad, just that humans are unsuited to these kinds of tasks. Like driving.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- danieldk 12y ago
thret 12y ago
I found all of the divorce stuff terrifying. If a pilot is away 10-22 days a month for their full time job, then even if their spouse has an affair and wants a divorce they still lose everything because they are not home enough? How is that right?
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Only if there are children involved.
- joosters 12y ago
  Look at it from the perspective of the children. How can a single parent who is away for 10-22 days a month look after a child?
  - thret 12y ago
    Better to be raised by a liar and a cheat who is comfortable turning around and making unreasonable demands on their hard-working ex? And putting them in jail if they can't pay? NO.
    - joosters 12y ago
      Was there some specific case you're referring to, or are you making broad sweeping generalisations?
      - thret 12y ago
        Just referring to the case(s) mentioned in the article.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    That means they should pay child support if a divorce happens. The well-being of the child doesn't require large alimony payments.
andmarios 12y ago
The question should be how to protect mentally ill people. One does not have to be a pilot to harm himself and/or many others.
FranOntanaya 12y ago
Perhaps any crew member should be able to switch on the autopilot from any part of the plane, then ground control or a timer would restore it. It couldn't be that hard either to track the position of the crew in the plane and change the security thresholds depending on it.
- rwmj 12y ago
  Autopilot was switched on in this case. The problem was the pilot had adjusted the target height to be inside a mountain. (He'd specifically set it to 30 ft). Technically speaking the autopilot crashed the plane, albeit on the pilot's instruction.
  - FranOntanaya 12y ago
    My brain keeps blocking that bit -- apparently we can land rovers on Mars but we can't do collision checks on an airliner's autopilot.
  - rwmj 12y ago
    I'm embarrassed to say that I confused feet and meters. The autopilot was set to 100 ft, which is approximately 30 m. Source: http://uk.businessinsider.com/aviation-tracking-service-germanwings-pilot-ordered-jet-down-to-100-feet-2015-3 http://uk.businessinsider.com/aviation-tracking-service-germ...
beggi 12y ago
You can be depressive or mentally ill without wanting to harm yourself or anyone else. Let's not blame the murder of 149 people on depression. The question really is, how to protect against malicious pilots?
- acqq 12y ago
  As I was younger, it was normal to see the pilots in the cockpit from your seat while flying, if the cockpit door existed it wasn't even closed. Why are people so scared today from everything? My question is, do we even need to "protect" from everything? Accidents happen sometimes, flying in big planes is still safer than driving. Improving the conditions for the pilots and crew is a good goal though. Somebody has to be responsible. If the pilots shouldn't be trusted, why should those that would override them be?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Somebody has to be responsible. Nope. You don't have to have any single person trusted - that's the whole point of having two pilots. This is just extending that basic systems architecture notion (having no SPOF) where it's lacking.
    - acqq 12y ago
      No, the point of two pilots is the possibility for them to chose who is actually controlling the plane at some given moment, optimizing their performance, not that you don't trust one of them. The current systems trust both.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      It's nothing to do with trust but everything to do with redundancy.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        Redundancy is a response to a lack of trust in the reliability of a component.
happyscrappy 12y ago
Europe will now use the same procedure as the the US never leaving less than two in the cockpit. Too late for the Germanwing passengers but at least they are implementing it after the fact.
- frik 12y ago
  Europe no, some European airlines yes. ex: Air Berlin and Niki yes, Lufthansa its sub-companies Germanwings, Austrian, etc. no. (source: exclusive CNN interview with Lufthansa boss)
  - johansch 12y ago
    https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/reversal-crash-hit-lufthansa-agrees-181347949.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/reversal-crash-hit-lufthan... "* Lufthansa to require two people in cockpit at all times * Reversal of earlier comments by CEO * EU agency issues recommendation for European airlines"
    - frik 12y ago
      Thanks, the Lufthansa CEO has changed his opinion fast. Good.
moe 12y ago
This is blown way out of proportion. Planes sometimes crash, such is life. Pilot already is a dying profession. In a few decades there will be nobody in the cockpit to "protect against" anymore. Until then we will see a few more of these incidents, just as we will see a few more planes used in terror attacks. It doesn't matter what feel-good measures we take. Humans are infinitely creative at circumventing[1] them. [1] cf. the TSA security theatre vs journalists regularly smuggling all kinds of weaponry onto planes just to show they can
ck2 12y ago
Aren't 150 innocent civilians dying everyday in Syria from a mentally ill dictator? That's a 9/11 every month. Where are the hours of news coverage for that every day? Also 30,000 people have died in Iraq since the "war" supposedly ended in 2011 and the US "left". That is a few 9/11's every year for them. By the way, every single middle-eastern country, every one of them, is currently at war, either civil-war or externally against another country or against groups like ISIS. Shouldn't thousands of hours of news time be devoted to that, like every opening paragraph on TV and in print should be - "the ENTIRE middle-east is currently at war". It is kind of important.
- pimentel 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism By that criterion, we shouldn't talk about a murder in our neighborhood, about our children failing at maths, about unemployment... War is worse than all these. Also, it's not news when every headline every day is "more 150 people dead in war". You think people would keep watching the news, let alone caring about some war far, far away?
  - ck2 12y ago
    BBC seems to be able to cover it almost daily. American "news" virtually never unless there is a talking point some politician is pushing. American "news" seems to find a reason to talk every hour about the plane mass-murder, many times just saying "we have nothing new to tell you" even the reporters they turn to simply repeat in different words what the anchor JUST SAID. So why not cover all the countries currently at war in the middle east every hour. They most definitely have news every hour on that one because more people have died. No more people are going to die in that single plane crash despite hundreds of hours of coverage.
    - mkr-hn 12y ago
      The American news I follow covers these things. Maybe you need better sources of news.
  - 12y ago
ghostberry 12y ago
Looking at the numbers, the mentally well have crashed many more aircraft on purpose than the mentally ill. So, how to protect against mentally well pilots?
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  What numbers are you looking at?
- egwor 12y ago
  interesting...do you have a source?
- mg1982 12y ago
  Forgive me, but crashing an aircraft on purpose excludes you from the sane club. The number is of mentally well people to do so is - and always will be - zero.
  - ghostberry 12y ago
    "Mentally ill" is not an insult you throw at people you don't like. It's a medical term.
dmritard96 12y ago
Will this change peoples attitudes towards fly by wire/remote pilots/drones? In theory, there should be a flight plan thats relatively straight forward and immediately upon unusual divergence from the plan you would think a remote pilot could peer in on what is going on and even override the controls... Obviously security concerns are important here.
- acqq 12y ago
  The remote pilots fly the unmanned drones which aren't a big loss when something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong there too, just it's not a big loss and nobody reports that. "One drone crashed instead of flying around, so what? That's why they are unmanned and cheap, that's why we use them actually."
littletimmy 12y ago
> Thus he has a child support and/or alimony order in place based on his $150,000/year pilot salary. If he can’t earn close to $150,000/year he won’t be able to pay this order, in which case he will join the roughly 1 in 7 child support payors who are imprisoned at some point for nonpayment (for not paying the court-ordered amount, Massachusetts offers the pilot a felony conviction, which means he won’t have an ATP certificate anymore and therefore won’t be able to work again, plus up to 10 years in prison). This is sickening and horrifying. Why aren't more people speaking up against this sort of nonsense? How on earth is putting a man in prison going to help him pay child support payments?
- mg1982 12y ago
  Wow - so close. How about: 'How on Earth is putting a man in prison remotely just or proportional'?
amelius 12y ago
Why not just allow ground control to open the cockpit door remotely?
- icebraining 12y ago
  How can ground control know if the pilot locked out isn't being forced by someone to ask for it? If you're going to rely on his/her word, might as well give him/her direct access.
- thesimon 12y ago
  Because it opens yet another attack vector?
bayesianhorse 12y ago
The only good thing that may come out of this tragedy is that suicide prevention gets taken more seriously. Unfortunately, the opposite may also happen, with disastrous consequences for anyone who people suspect of having a depression.
MeganS 12y ago
tl;dr: privileged white male gives take on airplane crash; blames divorce laws that are "sexist" against privileged white male pilots.
- shiggerino 12y ago
  I call Poe's law on this one.
cozzyd 12y ago
Yes, I'm sure the pilots will have better working conditions if they get rid of their unions...
corin_ 12y ago
63 comments and nobody else is shocked yet at "Airlines should be able to automatically fire divorce, custody, or child support lawsuit defendants"? (edit: sorry, one other person did mention it already) Setting aside how shit a situation that would put every pilot in, how about when considering problems try targeting the cause not the sympton: if you think divorce/etc. is bad enough to make a pilot a suicidal murderer, argue to fix the divorce system, not stop him being a pilot. Not that the author cited even a single example of divorce/children/etc. being the cause for an air crash...
- glogla 12y ago
  Yes, it's kind of funny (and more than one kinds of sad) how the reaction to "sick person does something terrible because his life is miserable," is "hey let's make more people miserable".
macco 12y ago
Arghh. I can't even escape that tragedy on HN.
glomph 12y ago
I think this statement from Mind is pretty relevant: "The terrible loss of life in the Germanwings plane crash is tragic, and we send our deepest sympathies to the families. Whilst the full facts are still emerging, there has been widespread media reporting speculating about the link with the pilot’s history of depression, which has been overly simplistic. Clearly assessment of all pilots’ physical and mental health is entirely appropriate - but assumptions about risk shouldn't be made across the board for people with depression, or any other illness. There will be pilots with experience of depression who have flown safely for decades, and assessments should be made on a case by case basis. Today’s headlines risk adding to the stigma surrounding mental health problems, which millions of people experience each year, and we would encourage the media to report this issue responsibly." Sue Baker, Director, Time to Change Paul Farmer, Chief Executive, Mind Mark Winstanley, Chief Executive, Rethink Mental Illness"
- tim333 12y ago
  Yeah, Lubitz seems to have been quite an extreme case and not typical of the depressed. From the Daily Mail quoting his ex: >"He never talked much about his illness, only that he was in psychiatric treatment," she told the paper, adding they finally broke up because she was afraid of him. >"He would suddenly freak out in conversations and yell at me," she recalled. "At night he would wake up screaming 'we are crashing' because he had nightmares. He could be good at hiding what was really going on inside him." >German authorities said on Friday they had found torn-up sick notes showing that the co-pilot was suffering from an illness that should have grounded him on the day of the tragedy. I guess in the future they may check up better on the torn-up sick note stuff.
jacquesm 12y ago
Shall we fire all the bus-drivers and train operators too that have families and that may be headed for divorce? If anything this will lead to planes being flown by remote control or using autonomous computers. Pilot is one of those jobs that carries some degree of respect from non-pilots because we trust our lives to them and expect them to infallibly do what's right. When an idiot decides to murder close to 150 innocents that were entrusted to his responsibility that will harm the whole institution of flight and all his colleague pilots as well. But let's not go overboard and fire all the pilots that could be at risk of divorce, most people are perfectly normal, madmen are the exception.
- quesera 12y ago
  Philip writes for his regular readers, and that was almost certainly intentionally absurd. He's an "if-this-then-that" sort of rhetoricist. If this absurd thing is considered socially acceptable, then obviously this even more absurd thing which logically follows should be acceptable too. He's working on a book about the travails of family law. He quotes from the book and the research extensively. He's deeply opposed to the calamities that are legally imposed on non-custodial parents. This would be one more thing on that list.
vermooten 12y ago
I couldn't possibly let my employers knows I suffer from the black dog, even though the very worst that could possibly happen is that some software would get delivered late. It would be seen as weakness by colleagues, upper management etc - if anything goes wrong then it would be 'Oh well he's depressed, better not give him any important work to do in case he flips out.'
downandout 12y ago
Firing pilots because they are going through a divorce, as suggested by the author, seems a little extreme. CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) crashes such as this - whether accidental or intentional - can be eliminated by technology and hopefully will be soon. Airlines can complain about the cost all they want - the direct loss projection from this single incident is $350 million [1]. The cost of doing nothing is demonstrably greater than the cost of developing and deploying a CFIT prevention system. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-27/co-pilot-suicide-leaves-lufthansa-facing-unlimited-liability http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-27/co-pilot-s...
- sokoloff 12y ago
  I agree that we can make great strides against unintentional CFIT accidents, but don't think we can rely on tech to eliminate intentional CFITs. Cut the fuel supply to both engines; what's the computer going to do? Now, if you protect against that, what's to prevent that system from stopping a pilot from extinguishing an in-flight fire in a situation where cutting fuel to one engine (or perhaps two/all) is the right response?
  - downandout 12y ago
    But you're implying that we can't make the aircraft smart enough to know that there is a fire and that cutting fuel is the right thing to do. I believe we can.
    - sokoloff 12y ago
      How can you ensure that the fire detection circuitry isn't ever mis-wired in the field (such that when engine 1 catches fire that the computer knows that it's engine 1 and not engine 2)? If that happens (and it's certainly the case that engine indicators have been crossed before in the field), the pilot now couldn't shut down the engine with the fire (theorizing that the computer wouldn't allow the discharge of fire bottles and cutoff of fuel to the only engine NOT displaying a fire alarm). Or an engine that's streaming fuel (but not burning). Mid-ocean, you might want to cut the fuel to ensure you make landfall. Substitute other failure scenarios as you need, realizing that any system has cases where the pax die when an alternate system would have saved them, but also vice versa. It's not that we can't get systems that are right way more often than they're wrong, but that's still a long way to go from there to taking control from the pilot(s), IMO. A determined suicidal pilot can find a way. If they can't, then they don't even need to be on the airplane right? Disclaimer: I'm a [small airplane] pilot and well aware that I'm more likely to cause a crash from my own doing than from poor maintenance, but I definitely subscribe to the Boeing philosophy more than the Airbus...
hitchhiker999 12y ago
Didn't the almost exact same thing happen 2 weeks ago? A plane did a nose dive (but that time recovered) - or ?

58 points by ivank 12y ago

I like that comment about crash axe vs. two quarters and a dime and a set of car keys. However, this one I disagree slightly: "Could this crash have been prevented if a flight attendant had been in the cockpit? “No,” is the short answer. " The presence of a flight attendant does not make it impossible for a determined suicidal co-pilot to crash the plane. Heck, even the presence of captain doesn't. But while you can physically destroy the plane even if someone is right there, in the case of a mental disorder it is more difficult to do it. The presence of another human has an impact on you.

ghshephard 12y ago
Agreed - In california, a lot (most?) of the gun ranges will not let you go by yourself, you need to have a buddy. Now, obviously there is zero ability for a bystander to prevent you from doing something harmful with a firearm, should you chose to do so, but the mere presence of someone else, radically reduces the chance that you will do so.
- fnazeeri 12y ago
  Source?
  - corin_ 12y ago
    I only have an anecdote, but I had a day to kill in LA a few years back, and really fancied going to a pistol range (never tried - only used a shotgun here in the UK) - Googling and phoning all the ranges I could find within the LA area I couldn't find any that would let me go without somebody else with me (I was out there alone for work).
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    I have a number of friends who are huge gun fiends, who are always hounding me to go with them so they have the second person. This is just for handguns, long guns, for some reason, don't have that requirement, and allow you to go out on the range solo.

shiggerino 12y ago

>If he can’t earn close to $150,000/year he won’t be able to pay this order, in which case he will join the roughly 1 in 7 child support payors who are imprisoned at some point for nonpayment (for not paying the court-ordered amount, Massachusetts offers the pilot a felony conviction, which means he won’t have an ATP certificate anymore and therefore won’t be able to work again, plus up to 10 years in prison). It doesn't help that the United States still has such medieval instruments as debtor's jail. While more civilized countries have programs in place to help debtor's with counselling, restructuring and suicide prevention, the United States debtor's jail system makes sure you'll never get out of debt, and that you'll die in debt. Never mind that the creditor won't get what they are owed under this system. Never mind whether the creditor even exists: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/02/15/woman-jailed-late-video-return/5512821/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/02/15/woman-jailed-l...

SeanDav 12y ago
I have no idea if the USA has a debtors jail or not, but I don't think this is about going to jail for being in debt, it is about going to jail for breaking a court imposed order. The court order could have been about a restraining order, in which case you go to jail for breaking a restraining order. This does not mean that the USA has a jail specifically for any possible violation of a court imposed order.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  Which is for non-payment of debt, which is debtors prison.
- mg1982 12y ago
  It's a distinction without a difference if the court is ordering you to pay money that don't have and can't get.
- bayesianhorse 12y ago
  The US doesn't have debtor's prison per se. Only certain kinds of obligations, which are already associated with "jailable" offenses can result in something that looks a lot like debtor's prison. In some cases not being able to pay a debt really should carry a jail sentence, for example in case of clearly fraudulent behavior. John Oliver talks about a particular kind of "debtor's jail" in a recent episode of "Last Week Tonight". It seems though that appeal courts don't look favorably on such jail terms.

amix 12y ago

I think this could be prevented by removing humans from the cockpit and let computers take over. Computers are already controlling most of the things inside an airplane. If this isn't possible, then the flight software should at least have protection against malicious pilots (this would protect against the mentally ill and also against terrorism (e.g. 9/11)). Basically, the planes could have failsafes to prevent malicious pilots from crashing them down or crashing them into things.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Ya Get rid of the persons involved...i.e. Self flying planes. It will happen eventually, it is a much easier problem than self driving cars, and there are already planes that can take off and land themselves in certain conditions. But this isn't really a huge frequent problem, just one that gets a lot of press.
- acqq 12y ago
  Why stop there? The best way to get rid of persons involved is not flying the passengers. Until then, having the human pilot capable of overriding the computer is actually a good thing, see danieldk's comment. That the computers should help the humans as much as possible is indisputable, but it's a gradual and hard process to bring the real improvements.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    In the long term it's ineveitable, juist like self ddiving cars are. Computers are actually very suitable for this. Today, ya, maybe not yet, but we are definitely close. Flying is a hard job on humans, the hours suck, the job can be very monontomous. The problem isn't that the pilots are evil/bad, just that humans are unsuited to these kinds of tasks. Like driving.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
danieldk 12y ago

thret 12y ago

I found all of the divorce stuff terrifying. If a pilot is away 10-22 days a month for their full time job, then even if their spouse has an affair and wants a divorce they still lose everything because they are not home enough? How is that right?

ghshephard 12y ago
Only if there are children involved.
joosters 12y ago
Look at it from the perspective of the children. How can a single parent who is away for 10-22 days a month look after a child?
- thret 12y ago
  Better to be raised by a liar and a cheat who is comfortable turning around and making unreasonable demands on their hard-working ex? And putting them in jail if they can't pay? NO.
  - joosters 12y ago
    Was there some specific case you're referring to, or are you making broad sweeping generalisations?
    - thret 12y ago
      Just referring to the case(s) mentioned in the article.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  That means they should pay child support if a divorce happens. The well-being of the child doesn't require large alimony payments.

andmarios 12y ago

The question should be how to protect mentally ill people. One does not have to be a pilot to harm himself and/or many others.

FranOntanaya 12y ago

Perhaps any crew member should be able to switch on the autopilot from any part of the plane, then ground control or a timer would restore it. It couldn't be that hard either to track the position of the crew in the plane and change the security thresholds depending on it.

rwmj 12y ago
Autopilot was switched on in this case. The problem was the pilot had adjusted the target height to be inside a mountain. (He'd specifically set it to 30 ft). Technically speaking the autopilot crashed the plane, albeit on the pilot's instruction.
- FranOntanaya 12y ago
  My brain keeps blocking that bit -- apparently we can land rovers on Mars but we can't do collision checks on an airliner's autopilot.
- rwmj 12y ago
  I'm embarrassed to say that I confused feet and meters. The autopilot was set to 100 ft, which is approximately 30 m. Source: http://uk.businessinsider.com/aviation-tracking-service-germanwings-pilot-ordered-jet-down-to-100-feet-2015-3 http://uk.businessinsider.com/aviation-tracking-service-germ...

beggi 12y ago

You can be depressive or mentally ill without wanting to harm yourself or anyone else. Let's not blame the murder of 149 people on depression. The question really is, how to protect against malicious pilots?

acqq 12y ago
As I was younger, it was normal to see the pilots in the cockpit from your seat while flying, if the cockpit door existed it wasn't even closed. Why are people so scared today from everything? My question is, do we even need to "protect" from everything? Accidents happen sometimes, flying in big planes is still safer than driving. Improving the conditions for the pilots and crew is a good goal though. Somebody has to be responsible. If the pilots shouldn't be trusted, why should those that would override them be?
- icebraining 12y ago
  Somebody has to be responsible. Nope. You don't have to have any single person trusted - that's the whole point of having two pilots. This is just extending that basic systems architecture notion (having no SPOF) where it's lacking.
  - acqq 12y ago
    No, the point of two pilots is the possibility for them to chose who is actually controlling the plane at some given moment, optimizing their performance, not that you don't trust one of them. The current systems trust both.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    It's nothing to do with trust but everything to do with redundancy.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Redundancy is a response to a lack of trust in the reliability of a component.

happyscrappy 12y ago

Europe will now use the same procedure as the the US never leaving less than two in the cockpit. Too late for the Germanwing passengers but at least they are implementing it after the fact.

frik 12y ago
Europe no, some European airlines yes. ex: Air Berlin and Niki yes, Lufthansa its sub-companies Germanwings, Austrian, etc. no. (source: exclusive CNN interview with Lufthansa boss)
- johansch 12y ago
  https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/reversal-crash-hit-lufthansa-agrees-181347949.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/reversal-crash-hit-lufthan... "* Lufthansa to require two people in cockpit at all times * Reversal of earlier comments by CEO * EU agency issues recommendation for European airlines"
  - frik 12y ago
    Thanks, the Lufthansa CEO has changed his opinion fast. Good.

moe 12y ago

This is blown way out of proportion. Planes sometimes crash, such is life. Pilot already is a dying profession. In a few decades there will be nobody in the cockpit to "protect against" anymore. Until then we will see a few more of these incidents, just as we will see a few more planes used in terror attacks. It doesn't matter what feel-good measures we take. Humans are infinitely creative at circumventing[1] them. [1] cf. the TSA security theatre vs journalists regularly smuggling all kinds of weaponry onto planes just to show they can

ck2 12y ago

Aren't 150 innocent civilians dying everyday in Syria from a mentally ill dictator? That's a 9/11 every month. Where are the hours of news coverage for that every day? Also 30,000 people have died in Iraq since the "war" supposedly ended in 2011 and the US "left". That is a few 9/11's every year for them. By the way, every single middle-eastern country, every one of them, is currently at war, either civil-war or externally against another country or against groups like ISIS. Shouldn't thousands of hours of news time be devoted to that, like every opening paragraph on TV and in print should be - "the ENTIRE middle-east is currently at war". It is kind of important.

pimentel 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism By that criterion, we shouldn't talk about a murder in our neighborhood, about our children failing at maths, about unemployment... War is worse than all these. Also, it's not news when every headline every day is "more 150 people dead in war". You think people would keep watching the news, let alone caring about some war far, far away?
- ck2 12y ago
  BBC seems to be able to cover it almost daily. American "news" virtually never unless there is a talking point some politician is pushing. American "news" seems to find a reason to talk every hour about the plane mass-murder, many times just saying "we have nothing new to tell you" even the reporters they turn to simply repeat in different words what the anchor JUST SAID. So why not cover all the countries currently at war in the middle east every hour. They most definitely have news every hour on that one because more people have died. No more people are going to die in that single plane crash despite hundreds of hours of coverage.
  - mkr-hn 12y ago
    The American news I follow covers these things. Maybe you need better sources of news.
- 12y ago

ghostberry 12y ago

Looking at the numbers, the mentally well have crashed many more aircraft on purpose than the mentally ill. So, how to protect against mentally well pilots?

jsprogrammer 12y ago
What numbers are you looking at?
egwor 12y ago
interesting...do you have a source?
mg1982 12y ago
Forgive me, but crashing an aircraft on purpose excludes you from the sane club. The number is of mentally well people to do so is - and always will be - zero.
- ghostberry 12y ago
  "Mentally ill" is not an insult you throw at people you don't like. It's a medical term.

dmritard96 12y ago

Will this change peoples attitudes towards fly by wire/remote pilots/drones? In theory, there should be a flight plan thats relatively straight forward and immediately upon unusual divergence from the plan you would think a remote pilot could peer in on what is going on and even override the controls... Obviously security concerns are important here.

acqq 12y ago
The remote pilots fly the unmanned drones which aren't a big loss when something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong there too, just it's not a big loss and nobody reports that. "One drone crashed instead of flying around, so what? That's why they are unmanned and cheap, that's why we use them actually."

littletimmy 12y ago

> Thus he has a child support and/or alimony order in place based on his $150,000/year pilot salary. If he can’t earn close to $150,000/year he won’t be able to pay this order, in which case he will join the roughly 1 in 7 child support payors who are imprisoned at some point for nonpayment (for not paying the court-ordered amount, Massachusetts offers the pilot a felony conviction, which means he won’t have an ATP certificate anymore and therefore won’t be able to work again, plus up to 10 years in prison). This is sickening and horrifying. Why aren't more people speaking up against this sort of nonsense? How on earth is putting a man in prison going to help him pay child support payments?

mg1982 12y ago
Wow - so close. How about: 'How on Earth is putting a man in prison remotely just or proportional'?

amelius 12y ago

Why not just allow ground control to open the cockpit door remotely?

icebraining 12y ago
How can ground control know if the pilot locked out isn't being forced by someone to ask for it? If you're going to rely on his/her word, might as well give him/her direct access.
thesimon 12y ago
Because it opens yet another attack vector?

bayesianhorse 12y ago

The only good thing that may come out of this tragedy is that suicide prevention gets taken more seriously. Unfortunately, the opposite may also happen, with disastrous consequences for anyone who people suspect of having a depression.

MeganS 12y ago

tl;dr: privileged white male gives take on airplane crash; blames divorce laws that are "sexist" against privileged white male pilots.

shiggerino 12y ago
I call Poe's law on this one.

cozzyd 12y ago

Yes, I'm sure the pilots will have better working conditions if they get rid of their unions...

corin_ 12y ago

63 comments and nobody else is shocked yet at "Airlines should be able to automatically fire divorce, custody, or child support lawsuit defendants"? (edit: sorry, one other person did mention it already) Setting aside how shit a situation that would put every pilot in, how about when considering problems try targeting the cause not the sympton: if you think divorce/etc. is bad enough to make a pilot a suicidal murderer, argue to fix the divorce system, not stop him being a pilot. Not that the author cited even a single example of divorce/children/etc. being the cause for an air crash...

glogla 12y ago
Yes, it's kind of funny (and more than one kinds of sad) how the reaction to "sick person does something terrible because his life is miserable," is "hey let's make more people miserable".

macco 12y ago

Arghh. I can't even escape that tragedy on HN.

glomph 12y ago

I think this statement from Mind is pretty relevant: "The terrible loss of life in the Germanwings plane crash is tragic, and we send our deepest sympathies to the families. Whilst the full facts are still emerging, there has been widespread media reporting speculating about the link with the pilot’s history of depression, which has been overly simplistic. Clearly assessment of all pilots’ physical and mental health is entirely appropriate - but assumptions about risk shouldn't be made across the board for people with depression, or any other illness. There will be pilots with experience of depression who have flown safely for decades, and assessments should be made on a case by case basis. Today’s headlines risk adding to the stigma surrounding mental health problems, which millions of people experience each year, and we would encourage the media to report this issue responsibly." Sue Baker, Director, Time to Change Paul Farmer, Chief Executive, Mind Mark Winstanley, Chief Executive, Rethink Mental Illness"

tim333 12y ago
Yeah, Lubitz seems to have been quite an extreme case and not typical of the depressed. From the Daily Mail quoting his ex: >"He never talked much about his illness, only that he was in psychiatric treatment," she told the paper, adding they finally broke up because she was afraid of him. >"He would suddenly freak out in conversations and yell at me," she recalled. "At night he would wake up screaming 'we are crashing' because he had nightmares. He could be good at hiding what was really going on inside him." >German authorities said on Friday they had found torn-up sick notes showing that the co-pilot was suffering from an illness that should have grounded him on the day of the tragedy. I guess in the future they may check up better on the torn-up sick note stuff.

jacquesm 12y ago

Shall we fire all the bus-drivers and train operators too that have families and that may be headed for divorce? If anything this will lead to planes being flown by remote control or using autonomous computers. Pilot is one of those jobs that carries some degree of respect from non-pilots because we trust our lives to them and expect them to infallibly do what's right. When an idiot decides to murder close to 150 innocents that were entrusted to his responsibility that will harm the whole institution of flight and all his colleague pilots as well. But let's not go overboard and fire all the pilots that could be at risk of divorce, most people are perfectly normal, madmen are the exception.

quesera 12y ago
Philip writes for his regular readers, and that was almost certainly intentionally absurd. He's an "if-this-then-that" sort of rhetoricist. If this absurd thing is considered socially acceptable, then obviously this even more absurd thing which logically follows should be acceptable too. He's working on a book about the travails of family law. He quotes from the book and the research extensively. He's deeply opposed to the calamities that are legally imposed on non-custodial parents. This would be one more thing on that list.

vermooten 12y ago

I couldn't possibly let my employers knows I suffer from the black dog, even though the very worst that could possibly happen is that some software would get delivered late. It would be seen as weakness by colleagues, upper management etc - if anything goes wrong then it would be 'Oh well he's depressed, better not give him any important work to do in case he flips out.'

downandout 12y ago

Firing pilots because they are going through a divorce, as suggested by the author, seems a little extreme. CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) crashes such as this - whether accidental or intentional - can be eliminated by technology and hopefully will be soon. Airlines can complain about the cost all they want - the direct loss projection from this single incident is $350 million [1]. The cost of doing nothing is demonstrably greater than the cost of developing and deploying a CFIT prevention system. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-27/co-pilot-suicide-leaves-lufthansa-facing-unlimited-liability http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-27/co-pilot-s...

sokoloff 12y ago
I agree that we can make great strides against unintentional CFIT accidents, but don't think we can rely on tech to eliminate intentional CFITs. Cut the fuel supply to both engines; what's the computer going to do? Now, if you protect against that, what's to prevent that system from stopping a pilot from extinguishing an in-flight fire in a situation where cutting fuel to one engine (or perhaps two/all) is the right response?
- downandout 12y ago
  But you're implying that we can't make the aircraft smart enough to know that there is a fire and that cutting fuel is the right thing to do. I believe we can.
  - sokoloff 12y ago
    How can you ensure that the fire detection circuitry isn't ever mis-wired in the field (such that when engine 1 catches fire that the computer knows that it's engine 1 and not engine 2)? If that happens (and it's certainly the case that engine indicators have been crossed before in the field), the pilot now couldn't shut down the engine with the fire (theorizing that the computer wouldn't allow the discharge of fire bottles and cutoff of fuel to the only engine NOT displaying a fire alarm). Or an engine that's streaming fuel (but not burning). Mid-ocean, you might want to cut the fuel to ensure you make landfall. Substitute other failure scenarios as you need, realizing that any system has cases where the pax die when an alternate system would have saved them, but also vice versa. It's not that we can't get systems that are right way more often than they're wrong, but that's still a long way to go from there to taking control from the pilot(s), IMO. A determined suicidal pilot can find a way. If they can't, then they don't even need to be on the airplane right? Disclaimer: I'm a [small airplane] pilot and well aware that I'm more likely to cause a crash from my own doing than from poor maintenance, but I definitely subscribe to the Boeing philosophy more than the Airbus...

hitchhiker999 12y ago

Didn't the almost exact same thing happen 2 weeks ago? A plane did a nose dive (but that time recovered) - or ?