(Mass murderer Andreas Lubitz in a lighter moment in San Francisco. Image cropped from a larger image in the Daily Mail).
I was going to talk to you this morning about the horrifying events in France, when an apparently fully capable Airbus A320 jet flew into rugged terrain, killing all 150 souls on board. It was a mystery all day yesterday. I have been busy but absent lately, busy with some stuff that is important to me, but hardly interesting to the general public and not suitable for The Daily.
Things changed this morning. After the events of the past year- the two 2014 crashes somewhere in the South China Sea (or the vastness of the Indian Ocean) and the Russian shoot-down of another over Ukraine- we are all semi-qualified to have opinions about the relative merits of the Boeing and Airbus flight control systems. That is, in a nutshell, that Airbus has computers fly the airplane, and Boeing gives the pilots a major role, though their jets are also highly automated.
If I have a choice I won’t fly on an Airbus. Normally we don’t.
Actually, I don’t like flying at all any more. But that is just an aside.
This morning we don’t have to worry about the uncertainty that made CNN a lot of money on MH370. Germanwings Flight 9525 Airbus A320 jet had been flying, accident free, for a couple decades, though there had been speculation of mechanical failure.
On the day of the crash was operating just fine. The mystery- or at least the front end of it- is over. A French prosecutor announced that examination of the cockpit voice recorder indicated the aircraft made its cruising altitude and command pilot Patrick Sonderheimer pushed his seat back and got up to take a leak.
Co-pilot Andres Lubitz locked the Captain out of the cockpit. He then calmly and deliberately uncoupled the autopilot and put the aircraft in a steady descent, periodically re-enabling the cockpit lock to defeat the Captain’s increasingly frantic attempts to get the armored door to open. The voice recorder shows Lubitz to be breathing normally, not panicked. Andreas then proceeds to fly the airplane into a steep mountain valley, where it impacts at 700 miles an hour, pulverizing the A320 and all its contents. He killed everyone unfortunate enough to have encountered whatever demons possessed him.
There is more- much more- but I stumbled across the comprehensive account in the UK’s Daily Mail, and Jake Wallis Simons, Darren Boyle, Allan Hall, Simon Tomlinson, Stephanie Linning, Harriet Sime, and Peter Allen have excellent team coverage of the whole appalling and callous crime at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3012053/Andreas-Lubitz-Germanwings-flight-9525-French-alps-crash-French-alps-Germanwings-plane-crash-Airbus-A320-Barcelonnette.html#ixzz3VUz6PERq
My contribution this morning was going to include a discussion of the motives of EpyptAir Flight 990’s first relief pilot Gameel al-Batouti. He deliberately crashed the Boeing 767 into the ocean east of Nantucket. There is some controversy over that, but they seem to be political rather than technical. The flight data recorder has Gameel trusting his fate to Allah several times, shutting down the engines and pushing the stick forward. The Egyptian investigation blamed rudder failure.
I trust the results of the American investigation. The Daily Mail talks about that is more detail as well, so I won’t bother.
So, here is the deal: between the fact that the airplanes are so automated that ordinary flight crews don’t necessarily know how to fly jets that become in extremist and can make really serious mistakes (Air France 447, Asiana 214 and Air Asia 8501), and sometimes their pilots decide to crash them (three on 9/11, Egyptair 990, possibly Maylasian Air MH370 and certainly Germanwings 9525), there is something really scary about the airline industry.
Considering the sheet number of daily flights, the almost foolproof nature of the technology and the skill of the world’s commercial pilots, this is not a statistically significant number. But it still makes you wonder about the role of passenger aircraft in grand personal or political statements.
We will know more about the motives of mass murderer Andreas Lubitz as the days go by, but that may or may not provide an explanation we can understand.
One thing we can do is insist that on the jets with only two persons on the flight deck, a member of the cabin crew has to come to the cockpit when the pilot or co-pilot needs to get up to hit the head. That might (or might not) have prevented this one. Someone with the clearance to be flying the jet could certainly plan to incapacitate a flight attendant on the way to committing some monstrous act.
We always plan to combat the last horror, not the next one and killers can be highly adaptive. But this morning,let’s do something that we can do swiftly, if imperfectly. The faces of the passengers haunt me. Profoundly.
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303