Airbus crash in French Alps
- Thread starter Duane P Wetick
- Start date
This is why the flight crew should be allowed to carry personal weapons.
1. If a pilot is willing to kill all the passengers, he doesn't require a weapon;
2. If the cockpit door fails, the pilot(s) can still be a last line of defense.
3. The pilot may have had a chance to shoot the door out -- yes, fraught with other secondary hazards, but no worse than a controlled descent into the side of a mountain.
1. If a pilot is willing to kill all the passengers, he doesn't require a weapon;
2. If the cockpit door fails, the pilot(s) can still be a last line of defense.
3. The pilot may have had a chance to shoot the door out -- yes, fraught with other secondary hazards, but no worse than a controlled descent into the side of a mountain.
IMO there is no technical solution to the murderous pilot unless we remove their absolute authority to fly the plane. Human minders and watchers can all be eliminated. (passively and easily by a impenetrable cabin door in this case)
Personally I just accept the 'mad' pilot probability as being very very low and worry about the thousand other things that can go wrong while flying.
Personally I just accept the 'mad' pilot probability as being very very low and worry about the thousand other things that can go wrong while flying.
This is one time I'm actually sad they were.As for NYT being a normally credible source... well, let's not go there.
Most aircraft compasses have no adjustment and, instead, you have a compass deviation card that documents the deviation observed on the ground under specific operating conditions. Given the use of the compass for flight operations, even this seldom gets used.
From the time they announced that the cockpit doors were going to be reinforced and made impossible to open from the outside while in flight, I have wondered whether that would be a net life saver or life coster. It would be very interesting to see an analysis of how many times the existence of the doors has demonstrably added to flight safety and how many times it has detracted from it. The simple fact is that the fraction of flights in which there is an external threat is miniscule (not zero, but very, very low) while the fraction of flights in which there is an internal thread is 100% (since it includes health and environmental risks that are present on every flight). Another factor that wasn't considered when this decision was made (and there was no way for it to be foreseen) is the reaction of the passengers and cabin crew to potential threats; passengers no longer sit passively by when there is a perceived threat -- they act quickly and decisively with an amazing level of consistency to subdue the threat long before they get to the cockpit door.
One thing that will be interesting to see is whether this appears to be preplanned or a moment of opportunity. For most airlines (don't know about Lufthansa) there is a two-person policy for the flight deck and if, in a two-person flight crewed aircraft, one pilot needs to leave the cockpit then one of the flight attendants stays in the cockpit if, for no other reason, than to open the door without requiring that the remaining pilot leave the controls (which isn't a biggie most of the time). If Lufthansa has such a policy and if this was preplanned, then the copilot had to trick the pilot into leaving the cockpit without following procedure. But it could also be that the copilot was simply depressed or otherwise mentally unstable and when the pilot left him alone in the cockpit (regardless of whether it was against policy) the copilot's mind started racing and he saw an opportunity to take this action.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr: They don't have a two person policy.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/cns...ing-only-1-person-cockpit-i-dont-see-any-need
I know what you mean about passengers, it's one thing to fly and be held hostage in some hellhole with a good chance of survival but when you know you'll be atomized to dust into a building or the side of a mountain jumping a guy with box-cutters or even a gun seems a no-brainer.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/cns...ing-only-1-person-cockpit-i-dont-see-any-need
I know what you mean about passengers, it's one thing to fly and be held hostage in some hellhole with a good chance of survival but when you know you'll be atomized to dust into a building or the side of a mountain jumping a guy with box-cutters or even a gun seems a no-brainer.
magnetic compases have internal moveable magnets that are used to compensate for local magnetic fields. usually there are screws on the face of the compass to adjust for fields from lights and such.
While I will agree with their CEO saying that they should not rush to change policy as a result of a single incident (that's a general stance that I agree with since rush changes often result in unforeseen negative consequences), I disagree that the policy shouldn't be changed. On U.S. airliners before 9/11 if only one pilot was left in the cockpit (even if there was a flight engineer in the cockpit) the remaining pilot had to go on oxygen in the event of a cockpit depressurization while the other pilot was away, which is demonstrably a very rare event -- in fact I believe that in the 1970s the odds of being hijacked were higher than the odds of the cockpit losing pressure. Normally, when there are two pilots at the controls, one pilot would fly the plane while the other pilot would donn their oxygen. Once the other pilot was on oxygen they would take the controls and the first pilot, if still conscious, would donn their mask. If they had gone unconscious then the other pilot would let them be until the flight situation was stabilized and then either assist them or summon help from the other member of the crew (and I believe that one of the flight attendants was designated to proceed to the cockpit to assist the flight deck crew in the event of an emergency as a matter of procedure. I don't recall whether it was the pilot or the co-pilot that would donn their mask first, but my guess is that the pilot would continue flying the plane while the co-pilot put their mask on, but I could be wrong as I could come up with a reasonable justification either way. The point being that procedures are supposed to cover unlikely events when routine actions put you at increased risk to those events. In the ere of the locked cockpit door, having one person in the cockpit is an unacceptable risk to the unlikely event of the sole flight deck occupant becoming incapacitated for whatever reason, particularly when it is mitigated at zero marginal cost just by having a flight attendant standby in the cockpit until the other pilot returns.
Even as a child in the 1970s and all the hijackings that occurred back then, I could not understand the official government recommendations to cooperate with the hijackers. I had no problem understanding that most passengers WOULD cooperate, I just could never understand why official policy would explicitly tell the bad guys that they have free reign. The same thing even today with office and school invasions. Out of pure coincidence a few days before the Virginia Tech shootings the Air Force Academy sent out guidance for workplace violence and it had the general guidance of sheltering in place and obeying the demands of the hostage takers, but it ended with the statement (paraphrasing as close as I can recall), "If an opportunity presents itself or if an opportunity can be made, engage and disable the attacker -- use of deadly force is authorized." As soon as I saw that, my immediate thought was , "Finally, someone gets it."
The important thing then was to get the plane on the ground quickly with the hijackers so ground teams could handle what screwy demands they had. When the plans turned into 'death-wish for all' as the hijacking objective that doesn't work so well.
While I fully acknowledge that it can be argued several different ways, I've always believed that when hijackers know that they are unlikely to encounter resistance from the passengers that they are more likely to make the attempt (all else being equal). Now, all else doesn't have to be equal, of course. If they know that hijacking country X's airliner will result in an armed retaking of the plane by force while hijacking country Y's airliner will result in protracted negotiations that may or may not lead to having their demands met and that hijacking country Z's airliner will almost certainly result in their demands being met, up to some point, which country can expect to see more of its airliners hijacked?
For all you magnetic people: even if following an incorrect magnetic compass heading (which he didn't do) that would not account for the controlled descent into terrain. He would just go off in the wrong direction.
Two men in the cabin did not help a few years back (sorry all searches turn up today is the current crash) when the copilot murdered the pilot before doing a suicide fall.
Two men in the cabin did not help a few years back (sorry all searches turn up today is the current crash) when the copilot murdered the pilot before doing a suicide fall.
