In the days just after the Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 27, flew himself and 149 other people into a French mountainside last month, Lufthansa’s chief executive confidently pronounced that Mr. Lubitz had been “100 percent” fit to fly, highlighting how little the airline knew of the pilot who shook confidence in the company’s reputation for training and management rigor.
Mr. Lubitz’s journey to the moment when he found himself alone at the controls of Germanwings Flight 9525 from Barcelona to Düsseldorf on March 24 exposes a series of failures and weaknesses at Lufthansa and throughout the industry and its regulators in dealing with mental illness among pilots. And it shows how little the industry and its regulators have done to acknowledge and address the most extreme manifestation of those psychological strains: pilot suicide.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/wo...id=145194&_r=0