GermanWings' lawyers must be
themselves by now.
This could cost them billions, or even put an end to the airline.
It's not fair, because clearly this chaps actions were quite unprecedented at least in European aviation.
The lawyers are going to ask what GermanWings training department was thinking about though, when they put this guy in the RHS knowing that he'd been off work for months with depression.
And what if that was a single episode of acute depression, resulting from something like a child (his, or a young sibling) dying under terrible circumstances? or some other similar "normal" cause for deep depression?
There is no straight line between chronic depression and suicide. Rather the contrary. There are millions of people walking around with chronic depression, some of them untreated, who never even consider suicide. Meanwhile perfectly non-depressed first responders may commit suicide after dealing with some major traumatic event, like a massacre or fatal train smash etc. and disaster survivors may kill themselves from "survivor guilt".