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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

What happens when the pilots need to use the bathroom? This has always bothered me when people talk about reinforced cockpit doors as a cure-all for hijackings.

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The cockpit door has a peep hole, and loitering near the front of the plane seems to be prohibited by most US air lines.

In addition, there is a protocol for this. The pilot will contact the flight attendant working in the front of the plane. The flight attendant will lock a beverage cart in front of the bathrooms, creating a (heavy, but not immovable) barrier between the cockpit and bathroom, and the rest of the plane. The flight attendant stands behind the cart, watching the passengers. The pilot looks through the peep hole, and when it is clear, comes out, locking the cockpit door behind him/herself. After using the rest room, the pilot knocks on the door to ask the copilot to open it. The peep hold is used to be sure the flight attendant is still standing guard and everything is normal.

There are obviously some risks here, as the door is opened briefly twice, but there are a number of steps taken to minimize this risk.

There are obviously some risks here

The biggest realized risk seems to have been Germanwings Flight 9525. A suicidal co-pilot waited until the Captain left the cockpit. Then he locked the door and flew the plane into the side of a mountain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

I'm curious - is this a 'known and standard' protocol adopted universally across many airlines? Or how do you know this? I guess I'm thinking that if this is 'known and standard' it may also be possible to design an attack against it.

There are some tweaks from airline to airline, but anyone who flies regularly has seen this general outline of events occur countless times.

An attack can be designed against any vulnerability. Whether that attack becomes practically executable remains to be seen.

This introduces a new risk, that of sabotage by airline personnel themselves. As in the case of the Germanwings intentional downing by what's now thought to be a mentally ill co-pilot. He'd locked the captain outside the cabin.

Protocols to ensure two crew members in the cockpit at all times are now being considered.

There was an exceptionally good essay on implications of this incident, with computer/systems security implications, though I cannot locate it. James Fallows' Atlantic piece was good, though not quite what I was looking for.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/ger...

Interestingly, the "two people in the cockpit at all times" rule was already law in the United States before the Germanwings incident.

I think if the alternative is a psycho/collection of psychos gaining access to the cockpit, a puddle/pile on the floor is a reasonable outcome in that situation.

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