door locks
 

Would it be prohibitively costly to have ground control of door locks, with a cabin radio communication with a ground station?
And zozo, that's a good question.

What's the use of that? Only makes it harder for the crew to remember them and that in itself is dangerous in case of incapacitation! It's simply used as a way to open the cockpit door AFTER A CERTAIN DELAY. If a terrorist were to use it without prior intercom contact with the cockpit or without being on the galley cam, the cockpit crew would simply lock the door. The cockpit door code itself is not that important!

Old cockpit doors policy allowed more than 3000 souls taken away by a few guys with cutters.


I mean, obviously the policy must be improved to cope with suicidal pilots but i can not see how you can have to cope with this without creating new hazards.


I mean it can get really hard to fight human stupidity as it's endless. If you have to protect an airplane from its pilots...then i get lost.

Cockpit Access
 

Only way is to prescribe to always have 2 persons on the flightdeck. This is already standard by some airlines. This at least requires conspiracy between 2 persons...

Apparently a locked door system which does not allow the captain to go back to the cockpit for for whatever reason is wrong. There should be a code that allows only the captain, F/O and head purser to overrule the doorlock from the outside.

Furthermore this crash after all the other crashes lately proves that some kind of constant datastream via satellites should be installed a.s.a.p. With the current state of tech should be not a big problem.

Jack

Most of us can probably remember as kids being invited up to the front to see the cockpit and chat to the pilots / 9/11 changed all that and a multi billion airport security industry Grew

Yet I use the tubes and friday night millions stream into those tubes. Dragging cases and from every religion and ethnic background imagine able
Security there would bring the system to a stop

Now there is the possibility of terrorism from within the cockpit and that is what it would be if proved to be true? What security costs in lost time to industry ?
Where do we go from here ?

It seems we need a rethink here in terms of the way we operate as follows:

(a) For short sector flights less than three hours I can see no reason why the crew need to leave the flight deck at all. As a healthy pilot should be able to 'last' until his destination.

(b) Having said that a cabin crew member in the jump seat when I pilot does leave the flight deck seems sensible, but on a short flight, any considerate pilot would not want to take the cabin crew away from their duties, just because they haven't 'planned ahead'.

(c) Then there is the turnaround, the low cost airlines will not like this, but flight crew should be allowed a mandatory, say 15 min break, in other words add fifteen minutes to every turnaround. This allows the use of toilets, freshen up and stretch their legs, not least as this is good for your alertness and health, and reduces the likelihood of a DVT.

(d) Then rethink of flight deck doors is needed, in terms of its operation and structure. The latter becomes apparent through this thread, that in the case of sudden decompression on the flight deck, it seems likely that the armoured door will end up embedded in the flight deck, failing that the adjacent partitions will collapse into the flighdeck.

(e) Finally, on this thread there was a suggestion of greater psychological enquiry regarding pilots, this would be very problematic, not least for those who had ever suffered depression or 'normal life events' at sometime, which probably includes most pilots, again how could you access issues such as breakdown of a marriage, financial problems, cumulative stress or extreme religious views. Of course I can see the psychologists and psychiatrists jumping on the bandwagon and employment laywers would have a field day.

Whilst it makes sense to always have 2 people in the cockpit, the idea that a FA "behind" the other pilot does not inspire confidence. Should the one person with ill intent be the FA and NOT the pilot, it would be pretty easy to disable the pilot from behind very quickly.

This scenario is greatly reduced with a longer training/experience period. ie another pilot/engineer. Not foolproof, but certainly better than an FA who can be there in a few weeks.

The entire reason and activation of locked doors was done with the best of safety intentions going back to the days of the VC10 being blown up in the Jordanian deserts, but is it beyond the wit and sensibility of all the brains who build these A/c, as well as you who fly them to come up with a safer system.

After all there does seem to have been quite a few situations from the Egyptian Pilot suicide to this latest incident that could be put down to a simple LOCKED door, with no other means of entry..WHY!!

The problem is the BEA attitude that refuses to speak at all. This behaviour is starting to bother a lot of people here. The almost military attitude of this body reminds me what happened in the AF447 disaster. Because the BEA refused to unveil the CVR transcript, someone decided that enough was enough and released it to the exterior. The transcript was released in a book "Erreurs de pilotage Nr5" by Jean-Pierre OTELLI in Sep 2011.
I think that a reform of this institution should be done. The BEA will explain that it is not its role to speak because of the judicial inquiry but in our world today this kind of attitude is totally unacceptable. The press conference yesterday was a masquerade if not a farce as I have heard. The Chairman when he was speaking knew that he was not saying the truth or hiding it, totally or partially. The BEA reputation in the crash investigations is widely admitted and not discussed but, if what have been published by the NYT is true ( how can you invent such things?!) this reputation is sullied if not ruined. The BEA is not entirely responsible of that. The BEA is an official body depending of the DGAC and the Minister of Transport and everything is subject to the administrative supervision. It says what one tell him to say.
The BEA site was named as "dot org" and now is "dot aero". It seem that the only desire of the BEA is to proclaim that it is independent but from who? This is intolerable. The BEA is an official body depending of the French State and do not have to be ashamed of that.

For the time being the BEA remains silent.

Now about the door. A 320 driver explained some minutes ago the way of working of the cockpit door on this aircraft.
There are two codes. The second is a high security one and is known by the crew only. The door is then opened with a switch. There is also an electrical lock mounted on the door in the cockpit side. This lock is activated by the crew and there is a timer. When activated the door will remain closed. The pilot said that it may be activated without having to stand up, according to your size.

In my opinion, a flight deck should always have a minimum of 2 people present, each of whom is capable of detecting and preventing an unauthorised act or incorrect procedure on behalf of the other. That is the 'two man rule' as applied to safety critical situations to prevent potentially hazardous activity and should become SOP for two person flight decks during flight.

There is a 'rule' about theories called 'Ockham's Razor'. The fewer assumptions upon which the theory is based, the more likely the theory is to be true. For sure, in all disasters a number of phenomena have to line up as has been shown from all investigations from the Titanic onwards. Normally one event is the trigger, whatever the failings which proceeded. An iceberg with Titanic, failed O ring with Challenger, damaged tyre with Concorde.
It is more likely a single event has caused this incident, locked doors or no locked doors, suicidal pilots or not, slowly failing cabin pressurisation or not.

Isn't it ironic all these knee jerk reactions to previous incidents?

Let's add zillions of more automation gimmicks and gazillions of doors to be triple-locked and bigger hordes of friendly numpties who check us out on every flight.

We will however continue to be shook up by accidents induced by programs that were intended to "protect" us, or others induced by doors now locking out pilots in absence of the bad terrorist.

The cry is now out to do more extended background checks on us stupid and malicious pilots .....

.... but we will continue to forget to do this to the airline managers who drive us nuts and fatigued to the point of braking.

Automation, locks, eternal checks, checks, checks, but no more common sense!

Brave new world!

Not subscribing to the rogue pilot theory, just answering Beags point of:

Good luck - for that to be a meaningful precaution you need a minimum of three type rated pilots on each and every commercial flight......anything else (e.g using cabin crew to "sit in") would just be window dressing.

weebobby

I you think you're "finding things out" from any news source at the moment then have I got news for you.....I'll grant you the Americans seem to good at quoting un-named sources, unattributed sources .....perhaps it's simply a case of the American speculation being better/louder than the European version.

That is not going to solve anything!! Who says the FA wouldn't be dangerous him/herself?

Anyway, any pilot, who would be determined to crash the plane has a very good chance of being able to do so, regardless of how many people are in the cockpit! A nice firm push on the yoke or stick at 500 ft AGL, would do the job. That will work even in an Airbus!
Absolute security is unachievable.

There was also a persistent "rumour" that one Air Asia pilot (the Capt ) was not in his seat, which the investigators finally discounted.

As was posted on here yesterday, it may have been better if the BEA either said nothing (if there is nothing to say that is best ) or told us a little more about the contents of the CVR, less speculation run rife. . . . which is exactly what appears to have happened.

As previous poster has said, there is a code for the door lock . . . . . . . . so, "normally" 8-10 min is plenty time to get back in. . . . assuming he had found a portable 02 bottle if depressurisation was involved.

Because anyone with access to Google or Youtube can find this info since many years. Nothing new is being said here!

That may well be the case now ;) but I suspect you are wanting that code to be genuinely secret?

Trouble is when it comes to apply to a fleet of 150 aircraft, 3000 pilots and 10000 Cabin Crew. How do you inform people of the codes, rely on the crew remembering, change it regularly (?).

Prior to this accident, most debate over the door concerned the funny occasions the crew locked themselves out...

Unintended consequences
 

Unintended consequences can be roughly grouped into three types:

Unexpected benefit: A positive, unexpected benefit (usually referred to as luck, serendipity or a windfall).

Unexpected drawback: A negative, unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy (e.g., while irrigation schemes provide people with water for agriculture, they can increase waterborne diseases that have devastating health effects, such as schistosomiasis).

Perverse result: A backfire or perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse). This has been dubbed the 'cobra effect', after an anecdote about how a bounty for killing cobras in British India created a perverse incentive for people to breed cobras.

There will never be absolute security or safety, and often something implemented to solve one issue, will then open the door to an unintended issue.

Experience has nothing to do with ability to operate autopilot and other aircraft systems - this is dealt with IN FULL during type-rating training.