Not sure how credible Maria W. Is. She claims she was locked in a bathroom by Lubitz. That's not my understanding of how bathroom doors typically function.

The total environment
 

Great post Mark Beacon (currently 2390). Trust, wisdom, familiarity with the team, all in decline. I could tell a similar story. Trust amplifies when it is given, but has a hard time growing when not given. Familiarity provides more windows into another person. Randomized crews may be graphed as being capable of efficient action but I will never believe they function together as a cohesive, well informed team.

But would you have done the same thing if you 1) had just met the person; 2) found you had some unexplainable dislike for the person?

Piloto2011 I am afraid I disagree - it likely would have just altered the exact way he did it.
Such mitigations would reduce the concerns many have (including my own), but in the same breath would be why the airlines would likely resist (cost).

But they still leave the biggest problem unanswered - you are trying to "mitigate" having pilots on board who will deliberately crash the aircraft. That to me is an unacceptable premise, and not possible to comprehensively mitigate against. So I think the basic issue needs to be addressed, not accepted?

After 9/11, certainly in the airline I worked for (very big wide body operator) , the doors just appeared - no scenario guidance, no what ifs,no training, nothing

@Castlehard:

In continental Europe, internal doors often open outwards rather than inwards. You can lock someone in by blocking the door and refusing to let it open.

FullWings: (my bold)

Thanks FullWings! Finally a sensible post in this forum. The airline companies who have just decided to add a second person into the cockpit while one of the pilots are out are only responding to media hysteria! To add another person into the cockpit is to add another potential for hazard, once if a pilot wants to do harm, he will find a way to do it!!!

There may be another way. Most agree that drone/remote control/pilotless is not the way to go at least for the foreseeable. The PF could crash deliberately in close ground proximity by sudden gross control action impossible for PNF to overcome let alone a FA. In this case the pilot chose to set an un-cleared course, speed and descent towards high terrain. It would be fairly easy for an algorithm either onboard, ground or interactive ground/flight to take or prevent contol action in extreme circumstances. It would require a huge amount of technical evaluation and pilot input to find an appropriate balance but I think it could be done and implemented in a useful timescale.

Trouble is the only "useful timescale" most are working to now is that for tomorrow's newspapers :ooh:

Right. But 422 of them were in the past 3 years, suggesting this is something the airlines are right to be concerned about.

And your entire premise is wrong. Imagine if the industry had adopted your "acceptable loss" / "grip-getting" attitude? Presumably an occasional mid-air collision or door falling off would simply have required some corporate manning-up rather than spending millions to develop collision warning systems and redesigning doors...?

The ex-gf interview
 

To all who are speculating about quotes taken from this interview with his ex:

Please bear in mind that this "exclusive interview" with his ex-girlfriend was conducted by German newspaper "Bild". A sensationalist publication, comparable with Daily Mail and such, or even worse.

It's also well known that they pay good amounts of $ for "exclusive interviews".

I wouldn't pay too much attention to what is written in that newspaper.

The reinforced locking doors were certainly a reaction to 9/11 but I disgree that they were not carefully considered. No solution is perfect. The reinforced doors and locking mechanisms prevented some possible risks and introduced others. These new risks were doubtless considered and thought to be far less likely than the ones that were prevented, and thus a resonable trade off for the benefit provided, as nearly every safety and design decision is.

Life is not risk-free and it cannot be. We can never assure 100% safety.

Sanity Check
 

aguadalte

Are you suggesting a sanity cross check pre-flight?
Paramedics establish if a patient is mentally altered at a scene by confirming they are 4x4. Meaning you ask 4 basic questions and verify 4 correct answers e.g. name, todays date, who is the President, do you know where you are. Any hesitation or spurious answer helps assess the individuals state of mind.

IMHO this is flawed and far better to assume that one flight crew might become mentally altered at any time i.e. mid-flight. So you should have at least 2 people behind the security door at all times. Maybe consider putting a bathroom inside the secure cockpit area. Allowing only one person up front is clearly a single point of failure in an environment engineered for redundancy.

McRotor96, not sure that logic is correct - rather than the number of deaths would not number of fatal accidents be a better comparison? 40 years ago there were not as many aircraft capable of carrying 300/400 passengers given that most of the accidents involving suicidal pilots caused the deaths of all on board.

@McRotor96

It is seeing yet another knee-jerk reaction that worries me. You may well be correct, but I would have thought making this change and doing it correctly would require a fair amount of careful planning. Also, the huge publicity of this recent event may have caused the bad guys to see weaknesses in the system that they had not seen before.

The doors have since inception constituted an opportunity for a sole person to do what he wants with the aircraft without interference.

As long as the problem of pilot suicide only manifested itself in third world airlines, we first world folks perceived ourselves safe. I still remain disappointed that the regulatory authorities took no action the first time this happened.

Human nature is such that where there is an operational weakness, somebody someday will take advantage of it.

Back in the days when Stevenson et famille were putting up lighthouses in remote locations, much thought was given to minimum crewing.

Two keepers were deemed insufficient since one keeper could quietly do in the other and claim an unfortunate accident without any witnesses to the contrary.

The lighthouse minimum crew was set at three.

As for cabin crew being up front, many are given the training to help out in case of incapacitation. What we have here is the most severe form.

As for limited hours flown, military pilots are flying fast jets with far fewer hours.

nsmith

especially the last part of your post deserves a big thumbs up. I just had some user PM me in forcefull languague because I in a previous post had suggested a complete rethink of securty procedures involving the flight deck (and I gather from some commentators that I am not alone on this) outside of the public eye.

Of course any realistic and balanced approach to any procedure in therms of security needs to be outside of the public eye. Every procedure has weaknesses and a public discussion especially in a procedure design phase only highlights them to any misbehaving party.

Time flys...
 

We had widebody aircraft by three different manufacturers at that time.

But this misses the fact that even with 2 (or 5) people up front, your mentally altered person can still kill everybody.

As earlier stated, 500' on Approach, full down elevator, full power, maybe flaps up. On the Airbus, you even have the luxury of a red button to lock the other pilot's sidestick out.

In Re: "Benefit of Doubt"
 

Surely, if a person holds in their mind even a basic concept of the usual and customary (not even necessarily the "precise and technical") process for a proper Annex 13 investigation, there are very real concerns over the way this post-incident inquiry has been conducted. That being said, if a poster (such as the one referenced above) wishes to cast doubts upon whether the aircraft manufacturer might wish to get to a speedy conclusion, despite running roughshod over normal processes, then another question becomes a question that is fair to ask: does the configuration of the A320 Airbus type, as operated by the carrier in question, make it easier for a twisted aviator to conduct such a fatal flight profile? If there is nothing about the aircraft itself which either facilitated the fatal flight profile, or even attracted the twisted aviator into conducting it, then, what interest could the manufacturer really stand to have here, other than the insured risks which, to be blunt, are nominal. I know not even a paltry fraction enough about avionics and flight controls and the so-called magenta line to be able to answer this, but unless you can state a valid reason why the aircraft manufacturer might be called to account, again for either attracting a twisted aviator or facilitating him, in the way the flight controls and automation are arranged, there is no link between the seemingly highly irregular process conducted by the investigating authorities on the one hand, and the manufacturer on the other.

He mentioned both the number of deaths and events. You might also want to brush up on your history of airliners with regard to seating capacity and service entry dates.