Airline safety…
How do you detect and thwart a deranged killer? Except for close family and friends, I have no problem when someone, desperate, anguished, and out of his or her mind, commits suicide. Yes, it’s sad they couldn’t get some help (maybe they tried). In the new Chen and Castilblanco mystery, Family Affairs (going well, by the way), Sgt. C takes time from his niece’s case, where he’s moonlighting, to work on the detective duo’s caseload. He proves a man who was allegedly pushed in front of a subway train actually committed suicide. Turns out the man had pancreatic cancer. The big cop comments that he might have done the same.
Solo suicides, while sad and perhaps evidence for negligent care in our medical system, fundamentally affect only one person, by definition. Sure, family and friends might wonder if they or the system could have done better by that mentally ill person, but the successful suicide in this case isn’t killing other innocent victims. How that terrible decision morphs into mass murder must be case dependent, but, when it does, thousands can suffer.
Such was the case of the German co-pilot who set the autopilot of that Germanwings commuter jet on a hundred foot altitude. His suicide, if not motivated by terrorism (there’s no indication it was), has a similar effect on the friends and families of the passengers in that doomed flight. It’s clear he hid his mental illness from Lufthansa, or so they claim—it’s debatable whether airlines do enough to prevent these six-sigma events (the lawyers are already comforting those friends and families, I bet). His actions were deliberate too, tearing up notes from doctors and prescriptions. Did he have paranoid schizophrenia? Did his depression cause him to see all human beings as his enemy? Did he hear voices telling him to go out in a blaze of media glory? We might never know what was going through his mind.
A nice quiet suicide would have been the courageous way to go…if it makes sense to talk about courage when someone’s bent on suicide. If you can’t get help with the demons inside your head, at least don’t take it out on innocent victims. That just makes you into a mass murderer…enough bad karma that you’ll be reincarnated as a dung beetle. It’s also clear that suicide by cop is preferred. The cops who take down a deranged man or woman could have nightmares for years after such an incident, but fewer or no innocents are involved.
I’m being a bit facetious here—or call it black humor. But I’m tired of nut cases going after innocents. The Newtown and Colorado theater massacres were more of the same. Forget the gun control issues—a plane is a flying bomb, as the 9/11 terrorists proved in spectacular fashion. Acts of terrorism or just deranged fanatics? In some sense, all such acts are terrorism. Can you imagine what was going through the passengers’ minds as they saw their plane rushing toward that rugged mountainside in the French Alps? Pure terror! I’ve just learned that the EgyptAir crash off Rhode Island four years ago (2011) can be attributed to the pilot’s desire to kill the 30+ Egyptian military officers on board. Terrorism.
Of course, if you adhere to a restricted definition of terrorism, one where the principal motive is to cause terror among a large number of innocents, some of these incidents only become mass murder. In CIA parlance, the innocents who die are only “collateral damage”—there’s another agenda, silencing the voices in your head, getting back at all humanity, whatever. That’s a bit of sophomoric semantics, of course, and belies the important question: how do we stop isolated nuts from wreaking havoc in an airliner? Airlines might statistically represent the safest way to travel—hard to kill yourself and others by texting while traveling in a plane, for example—but the Germanwings case shows that airline safety isn’t a resolved issue. In fact, procedures put into effect since 9/11 worked against those poor innocents on that plane.
We all now know that the switch in the cockpit has three positions—open, a middle one requiring keyed entry from a security keypad, and an internal five-minute override to the latter. The co-pilot used the latter, maybe twice, in fact, to keep the pilot out. Maybe it would have helped to have a two-person rule, but would a flight attendant in that cockpit have been able to stop the deranged co-pilot? Probably not. Maybe an Air Marshall in the main cabin should have an override to the override? Some serious brainstorming is needed to come up with better procedures that cover all the eventualities.
That’s part of the solution. Better and more frequent psych testing also needs to be done. We’ve learned that beyond an initial assessment, it’s largely left to self-enforcement between pilots and crew. That’s not enough because self-enforcement has too many flaws. I flew a lot in my old day-job. I’d frequent those airport spots after a meeting for a quick dinner of sandwich and beer. I’d often spot flight crew, including pilots, doing the same. On more than one occasion, the breath spray would come out. A no-alcohol rule would seem to be the minimum requirement. Like many things, it’s on the books, but it isn’t often enforced.
Sleeping arrangements and hours on stopovers are often questionable too. More than one flight has gone down because the pilots are just too tired. A pilot can’t possibly be sleeping comfortably in a lounge chair in the airline’s special frequent flyer clubs, but I’ve seen them doing it. Again, enforcement is a problem. Self-enforcement isn’t the answer. Maybe that Germanwings pilot could get through that short flight without a bathroom break if he didn’t have a beer in the airport? I’m not saying that’s what happened, but, on such a flight, most passengers wouldn’t bother with the uncomfortable, coffin-sized bathrooms—the plane barely hits cruising altitude before it starts its descent.
Am I indicting the industry? Yes! Just as much as that suicidal maniac. Like too many things, greed has led to shortcuts being taken that fly in the face of logic and common sense—shortcuts in maintenance, shortcuts in employee screening, shortcuts in scheduling, shortcuts in airport security, and shortcuts in service, all due to the nefarious desire for higher corporate profits. Here in this country the FAA sits on its hands and pontificates. Overseas, in Europe, its worse, because many of the airlines are subsidized by governments seeking competitive leverage against their American counterparts. Airlines are big business, folks, and they’re creating an unsafe environment for the people they serve.
And so it goes….
