Germanwings Tragedy: How to protect against mentally ill pilots?
blogs.law.harvard.edu
blogs.law.harvard.edu
However, this one I disagree slightly: "Could this crash have been prevented if a flight attendant had been in the cockpit? “No,” is the short answer. "
The presence of a flight attendant does not make it impossible for a determined suicidal co-pilot to crash the plane. Heck, even the presence of captain doesn't. But while you can physically destroy the plane even if someone is right there, in the case of a mental disorder it is more difficult to do it. The presence of another human has an impact on you.
"The terrible loss of life in the Germanwings plane crash is tragic, and we send our deepest sympathies to the families. Whilst the full facts are still emerging, there has been widespread media reporting speculating about the link with the pilot’s history of depression, which has been overly simplistic.
Clearly assessment of all pilots’ physical and mental health is entirely appropriate - but assumptions about risk shouldn't be made across the board for people with depression, or any other illness. There will be pilots with experience of depression who have flown safely for decades, and assessments should be made on a case by case basis.
Today’s headlines risk adding to the stigma surrounding mental health problems, which millions of people experience each year, and we would encourage the media to report this issue responsibly."
Sue Baker, Director, Time to Change Paul Farmer, Chief Executive, Mind Mark Winstanley, Chief Executive, Rethink Mental Illness"
>"He never talked much about his illness, only that he was in psychiatric treatment," she told the paper, adding they finally broke up because she was afraid of him.
>"He would suddenly freak out in conversations and yell at me," she recalled. "At night he would wake up screaming 'we are crashing' because he had nightmares. He could be good at hiding what was really going on inside him."
>German authorities said on Friday they had found torn-up sick notes showing that the co-pilot was suffering from an illness that should have grounded him on the day of the tragedy.
I guess in the future they may check up better on the torn-up sick note stuff.
This is sickening and horrifying. Why aren't more people speaking up against this sort of nonsense? How on earth is putting a man in prison going to help him pay child support payments?
Setting aside how shit a situation that would put every pilot in, how about when considering problems try targeting the cause not the sympton: if you think divorce/etc. is bad enough to make a pilot a suicidal murderer, argue to fix the divorce system, not stop him being a pilot.
Not that the author cited even a single example of divorce/children/etc. being the cause for an air crash...
Improving the conditions for the pilots and crew is a good goal though.
Somebody has to be responsible. If the pilots shouldn't be trusted, why should those that would override them be?
Nope. You don't have to have any single person trusted - that's the whole point of having two pilots. This is just extending that basic systems architecture notion (having no SPOF) where it's lacking.
It was not unusual for the Flight Engineer to be senior to the drivers.
But the airline accountants highlighted the personnel cost of Flight Engineers and eliminated them, without ever considering the operational cost savings they provided. Even in mundane matters like resolving departure issues without having to wait for the on-call engineer.
"How long to fix it, eng?" became "What's wrong with it now? Back to the gate."
Modern ships are filled with fancy electronics, and it's usually poorly designed with broken software, that few know fully how to operate and nobody knows how to fix. This problem is only going to increase as they rely more and more on automation, and it's not going to stop until there is an accident severe enough to prompt aviation-style regulation and safety methodology.
'I trust the pilot' does not imply that I think that the pilot will have a long and healthy life. There are two pilots because one might have a medical emergency, emphatically not because one might go mad.
In fact, if one does go mad, even with the other one present, there are plenty of ways in which the 'mad' one can run the plane into the ground if they so choose to.
So the 'two pilots in the cockpit' kind of redundancy is to protect against the cases of individual pilots becoming incapacitated.
Of course having another pilot in the cockpit will probably somewhat reduce the chances of a pilot with a mental issue being able to inflict damage simply because he'd have to either get physical with the other pilot or at a minimum would have to look them in the eye. But that's nowhere near what is required to stop a plane from crashing if one of the pilots decides to do it.
Which is one reason why it doesn't really matter if a flight attendant is present in the cockpit instead of another pilot. That's mostly a psychological issue, not a practical one.
Pilot already is a dying profession. In a few decades there will be nobody in the cockpit to "protect against" anymore.
Until then we will see a few more of these incidents, just as we will see a few more planes used in terror attacks. It doesn't matter what feel-good measures we take. Humans are infinitely creative at circumventing[1] them.
[1] cf. the TSA security theatre vs journalists regularly smuggling all kinds of weaponry onto planes just to show they can
Where are the hours of news coverage for that every day?
Also 30,000 people have died in Iraq since the "war" supposedly ended in 2011 and the US "left". That is a few 9/11's every year for them.
By the way, every single middle-eastern country, every one of them, is currently at war, either civil-war or externally against another country or against groups like ISIS. Shouldn't thousands of hours of news time be devoted to that, like every opening paragraph on TV and in print should be - "the ENTIRE middle-east is currently at war". It is kind of important.
By that criterion, we shouldn't talk about a murder in our neighborhood, about our children failing at maths, about unemployment... War is worse than all these.
Also, it's not news when every headline every day is "more 150 people dead in war". You think people would keep watching the news, let alone caring about some war far, far away?
American "news" seems to find a reason to talk every hour about the plane mass-murder, many times just saying "we have nothing new to tell you" even the reporters they turn to simply repeat in different words what the anchor JUST SAID.
So why not cover all the countries currently at war in the middle east every hour. They most definitely have news every hour on that one because more people have died. No more people are going to die in that single plane crash despite hundreds of hours of coverage.
If anything this will lead to planes being flown by remote control or using autonomous computers. Pilot is one of those jobs that carries some degree of respect from non-pilots because we trust our lives to them and expect them to infallibly do what's right. When an idiot decides to murder close to 150 innocents that were entrusted to his responsibility that will harm the whole institution of flight and all his colleague pilots as well.
But let's not go overboard and fire all the pilots that could be at risk of divorce, most people are perfectly normal, madmen are the exception.
He's an "if-this-then-that" sort of rhetoricist. If this absurd thing is considered socially acceptable, then obviously this even more absurd thing which logically follows should be acceptable too.
He's working on a book about the travails of family law. He quotes from the book and the research extensively. He's deeply opposed to the calamities that are legally imposed on non-custodial parents. This would be one more thing on that list.
It would be seen as weakness by colleagues, upper management etc - if anything goes wrong then it would be 'Oh well he's depressed, better not give him any important work to do in case he flips out.'
Unfortunately, the opposite may also happen, with disastrous consequences for anyone who people suspect of having a depression.
I think we are not there yet:
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/lufthansa-airbus-computerpann...
tl;dr: frozen sensors put the plane on a crash course. Plane is saved by pilots completely shutting down the computer system.
We could certainly have software flying a plane tomorrow if we wanted to, at the cost of failure rates several orders of magnitude higher. Humans have the capacity look around, intuit what's going on and what doesn't make sense, and work around it. Software that can detect and understand what to do when 3 things that each occur only one in 1,000 flights, happen simultaneously while 3 out of 10 of the sensor networks are down for maintenance and rare weather patterns are occurring on the route.
We have 100,000 flights per day to cover. Right now, we have lethal accidents roughly monthly, but we have contingency conditions that might plausibly cause a lethal accident a thousand times more often, conditions that are caught, troubleshooted, and successfully mitigated by a human.
But yes, we'll reach a point where the liability of having human beings fly planes vs the sophistication/reliability of an automated system will reach the point where the answer is a foregone conclusion. It's just a half-century away.
More like 10-15 years.
Airliners already spend most of their life on autopilot today. Many (including the Airbus that crashed here) have auto-landing systems[1], too.
Fully autonomous passenger aircraft are being tested[2] in shared airspace since 2012.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland
[2] http://www.baesystems.com/magazine/BAES_051920/look-no-hands
Autoland needs ground equipment that is expensive to install and has stringent requirements on the surrounding topography that means many airports can not install it. It also takes 2 people's full attention to make the autoland happen in a consistently safe manner, it's not a case of pressing the LAND button and sitting back sipping tea. This video shows a bit of that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMydKAcqKCg
I'm no aviation expert, but isn't that only because the systems in civilian aircraft are decades old?
The state of the art in military drones seems to be autonomous landings on aircraft carriers[1]. The safety requirements for an Airliner are of course much higher than for an UAV, but the underlying technologies seem to be rather mature already.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4511476/autonomous-drone-f...
If I could afford it, I would love to make a $10,000 long bet as to when we will see a major airline routinely (1/day) fly a route with > 200 passengers.
I'm saying it won't be later than 2065, but also won't be sooner than 2050.
Where I don't think the technology is moving is on the executive level, which is where having a highly trained and knowledgeable flight crew in the plane is invaluable.
I'm guessing that any trained and qualified pilot of a large commercial airliner (which I am not), can immediately come up with 100 different scenarios for which there is no technology apparent in the next 15 years.
Put another way, in 10 years, 99.99%+ of the time, automated systems will be doing all of the actual takeoffs/flying/landing, but that 0.01% of the time is why we'll keep a flight crew in the cockpit.
Check out:
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/hazards-aut...
If we automate even more, the problem just becomes worse. We could pull back on automation to keep the pilots alert, but we are increasingly relying on it to optimize resources (air space, fuel, airport take off and landing slots, and ya safety).
And...that's just it. Computers don't get bored. I suffer from some depression also (who doesn't!), but I find that my job keeps me busy enough that I can keep it in check. Imagine being a bit depressed and sitting in a cockpit doing nothing for a few hours at a time.
But this isn't really a huge frequent problem, just one that gets a lot of press.
Until then, having the human pilot capable of overriding the computer is actually a good thing, see danieldk's comment. That the computers should help the humans as much as possible is indisputable, but it's a gradual and hard process to bring the real improvements.
Today, ya, maybe not yet, but we are definitely close. Flying is a hard job on humans, the hours suck, the job can be very monontomous. The problem isn't that the pilots are evil/bad, just that humans are unsuited to these kinds of tasks. Like driving.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-27/co-pilot-s...
Cut the fuel supply to both engines; what's the computer going to do?
Now, if you protect against that, what's to prevent that system from stopping a pilot from extinguishing an in-flight fire in a situation where cutting fuel to one engine (or perhaps two/all) is the right response?
Or an engine that's streaming fuel (but not burning). Mid-ocean, you might want to cut the fuel to ensure you make landfall.
Substitute other failure scenarios as you need, realizing that any system has cases where the pax die when an alternate system would have saved them, but also vice versa.
It's not that we can't get systems that are right way more often than they're wrong, but that's still a long way to go from there to taking control from the pilot(s), IMO.
A determined suicidal pilot can find a way. If they can't, then they don't even need to be on the airplane right?
Disclaimer: I'm a [small airplane] pilot and well aware that I'm more likely to cause a crash from my own doing than from poor maintenance, but I definitely subscribe to the Boeing philosophy more than the Airbus...
On your specific example, there's little life-safety risk in inadvertent retraction of the gear. Sure, you're going to make expensive sparks, but it is extremely unlikely that anyone will die or even suffer life-changing injuries. The only likely injuries are from the slides and evacuation process.
In contrast, being unable to raise the gear can be a life-safety emergency. Take a piston twin such as the one I fly. An engine failure with the airplane heavy and the gear down is a bona fide emergency.
Suppose I take a bird or deer strike just after liftoff that damages the propeller and the "squat switch" (the weight-on-wheels sensor that prevents the gear being raised electrically). The prop damage may force me to shut down that engine at the same time that I can't raise the gear electrically (because the squat switch says we're still on the ground). I may not be able to climb the airplane with the available power on the left side engine while manually cranking up the gear, and I'm heavy, low, and slow.
What first seems like a "duh, pilots would have to be idiots for arguing they should be able to raise the gear with weight on the wheels" is actually a tradeoff between a high likelihood of inadvertent switch mis-use with only financial consequences versus a very low likelihood of losing the aircraft an all on board.
Of course, people are both bad at math, bad at understanding low probability/high impact events, and very uncomfortable with "costing" human lives such that a tradeoff can be made across financial losses and human lives lost.
It couldn't be that hard either to track the position of the crew in the plane and change the security thresholds depending on it.
So, how to protect against mentally well pilots?
ex: Air Berlin and Niki yes, Lufthansa its sub-companies Germanwings, Austrian, etc. no. (source: exclusive CNN interview with Lufthansa boss)
"* Lufthansa to require two people in cockpit at all times
* Reversal of earlier comments by CEO
* EU agency issues recommendation for European airlines"
It doesn't help that the United States still has such medieval instruments as debtor's jail.
While more civilized countries have programs in place to help debtor's with counselling, restructuring and suicide prevention, the United States debtor's jail system makes sure you'll never get out of debt, and that you'll die in debt. Never mind that the creditor won't get what they are owed under this system. Never mind whether the creditor even exists: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/02/15/woman-jailed-l...
The court order could have been about a restraining order, in which case you go to jail for breaking a restraining order. This does not mean that the USA has a jail specifically for any possible violation of a court imposed order.
John Oliver talks about a particular kind of "debtor's jail" in a recent episode of "Last Week Tonight". It seems though that appeal courts don't look favorably on such jail terms.
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> Airlines should be able to automatically fire divorce, custody, or child support lawsuit defendants.
You really want to discriminate against pilots with families? The logical next step would be fire any pilot who gets married or has a child - because obviously the pilot's personal life is from thereon a potential cause of depression and mental problems.
Hell, why not require pilots to be eunuchs while you're at it? That way they couldn't have dangerous relationships.
Talk about slippery slopes and unintended consequences.
EDIT: looks like the post I replied to was deleted while I was composing.