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Comment by klinquist | Hacker News Reader

Already on VASAviation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbU6E6VJx30

As a European pilot I'm always so surprised by the unprofessional incident handling of American ATC. Seriously, this crew is shaken up, someone in the cockpit interfered with the flight. Now they're making an unplanned approach and landing. Meaning lots of work, briefing, checklists, communicating with the company. They're busy. Why is ATC asking them three times what gate they're going to. Never heard that in Europe. Let ground figure it out, direct them to an available gate that works for law enforcement...

And even crazier to ask two times what the previous threat level has been, "for our report", what?? Write your report when we're on the ground. Figure it out yourself. Absolutely no need for those questions during flight.

They needed the gate number in order to direct law enforcement to the correct gate to arrest the guy.

They should have better methods of obtaining that information, but, I doubt they do.

They did need that information and I don't think it's a poor reflection of that controller.

Sure. But in other places ATC would arrange a gate, request law enforcement to that gate, then have ground control direct the aircraft to that gate after landing. No need for the crew to discuss and relay gate assignment to ATC while in the air.

When asked by ATC, the pilots mention the threat level escalated to a 4 (at 2:39).

I wasn't familiar with this scale so I looked it up, it's from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO):

    Level 1 — Disruptive behavior (verbal)
    Level 2 — Physically abusive behavior
    Level 3 — Life-threatening behavior (or display of a weapon)
    Level 4 — Attempted or actual breach of the flight crew compartment

Interesting with this incident, it was "technically" -- in the most pedantic sense of the word -- not a level four.

The guy never breached the cockpit, he was already IN the cockpit!

Scary stuff, fortunately he was both deranged and incompetent.

> The guy never breached the cockpit, he was already IN the cockpit!

IMHO breaching the cockpit by physically forcing the door and breaching it by deception are essentially the same in the end.

Thankfully this ended as well as it could have and might help in preventing something similar in the future.

I think they are using this list in the most practical sense possible rather than wordsmithing and if you look at it as a multiple-choice set then that's the answer that fits best. They would have used the same code if it was either one of the pilots that went mad.

The fact that these pilots always (seemingly) remain cool as a cucumber, despite the fact that someone just tried to murder them and 82 other people, always amazes me.

They probably got the shakes after they landed. When your life depends on getting a job done, adrenaline kicks in and you get it done. Plus flying is a very standardized, checklist-oriented task. They can fall back to their routines as a distraction from what just happened.

It's absolutely incredible.

You can listen to pilots moments before they are about to die and they are nearly universally calm and collected.

I like to remember that when things are figuratively on fire.

They’re both selected and trained for that quality, as are the rest of the flight crew.

After seeing where those handles were, how in the hell did the crazy pilot fail to pull them before getting kicked out of the cockpit by pilots who were presumably strapped in when he officially flew off the handle? Did he do the old "in 30 seconds I'm going to execute my evil master plan" villain announcement trope from the movies while twirling his mustache?

Based on a comment below: He succeeded, but it's reversible and the engine doesn't even go out immediately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37992730

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