lomapaseo
For starters I would like at least to revisit today's assessment of terrorist risk that was thought to be minimized by a locked door vs requiring a second person (FA) during breaks vs a single man cockpit, etc. etc.
Yes, which prompts the thought that so far the regulator (EASA and to a lesser extent LBA) has failed miserably, and predictably. Why?
Since October 2012 AOC holders in EASA-land have been required to have and operate effective Safety Management procedures, within their Management System. (OPS.GEN.200, for the really interested.)
To simply, perhaps slightly over-simplify, safety management is fundamentally the pro-active search for and identification of hazards, followed by assessment, prioritisation and mitigation. It is a necessary part of Safety Management that all employees are encouraged to report hazards they see or know about.
It is the regulators task to make sure that Operators are doing this, and to pull them up if not, with the ultimate sanction of withdrawal of the AOC.
I find it very hard to believe that any rational person would not admit that leaving 1 person on the flight deck, behind a locked and potentially impenetrable door is a hazard with a potentially catastrophic outcome, and then mitigate it either by having a 2-person rule, or by making it possible to gain entry regardless of the actions of whoever is on the other side. It might well then be thought that the 2-person rule is the only way to mitigate the hazard without increasing the terrorist/piracy hazard.
I find it equally hard to believe that many aircrew, at least, have not been very aware of the potential risk.
If anyone had reported this hazard, properly run Safety Management would and should have picked it up and dealt with it, and of course many airlines did just that.
But others did not, obviously, presumably because their Safety Management is more lip service than real.
The real villains in the piece, cowering behind their desks, are the National Aviation Authorities who did nothing about that except, perhaps, ask them politely to think about it. In the UK the CAA would have been worrying more about forcing Operators to buy their over-priced SMS courses than real safety at the coal-face.
And of course, in Europe we have EASA's merry band of bureaucrats who will now leap/have just leaped into action to prevent the accident after itt happened.
And once again we have seen that the USA is miles ahead of the rest of the world in aviation safety as opposed to paper-shuffling and politics.