Off Topic Airbus A320 Crash In French Alps

Terrorism is usually defined as having some sort of ideological motive, and to have an organisational basis. This seems to be a random act of mass murder.
Utterly tragic in every way.

 

Unfortunately no one to charge.

 

Having worked as cabin crew for a large airline I can assure you there are plenty of male cabin crew! It was very rare for me to fly with 3 women there was usually me plus another. Though it will depend which airline and which airport. And the crew are usually good at selecting the right person for the right job. I would for example always be selected (at 6ft3) to guard the flight deck door when a pilot needed to go to the toilet.

The crew member doesn't have to be physically very strong, they just need to understand how the plane works and have a good procedure to follow.

It is a very, very, very rare occurrence for a pilot to commit suicide whilst at the helm of plane and it'd be ridiculous to hire an additional member of crew purely for this occasion.

 

If the cabin crew member was being talked down by air traffic control there is every possibility they could fly an airbus tbh lol

 

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Relatives of victims.

 

The answer to this is technology surely, that and actual psychological screening of staff after they are hired, not just as they are hired.
Had this guy been properly screened since being hired they might well have avoided this.
The guy was seriously depressed it seems, but, as with many that face depression, there is not a desire to take over 100 people with you, there was something else going on with this guy too, he was obvioously depressed and extremely self destructive, maybe angry.

 

They are already continually assessed.

The highlighted bit is spot on, but what was going on with him was that he was a self absorbed ****

 

If he's had a sudden onset depressive episode or whatever it's called then he won't have been thinking straight, even so I fail to see how you'd forget or block out the fact that you're co-piloting an airplane with 149 passengers and crew onboard. I wonder if he'd been planning this and had thoughts about doing it before or whether it was a spontaneous decision in a moment of hopelessness?? Did these pilots fly together on this route regularly?? Did the pilot always take a piss-break at this point in the journey and allow the co-pilot to factor this into his suicide plan?? Had the co-pilot previously identified this area as a good place to bring the plane down?? It's true, most depressed and suicidal people only want to take their own life, hence jumping off a building/bridge, cutting wrists, hanging whatever. There's something different about this. The first thing that came to mind for me when I heard about this was something like Columbine or other school shootings, or Anders Behring Breivik the Norwegian terrorist. However there doesn't appear to be a terrorist motive to this, unless they find stuff in his house/on his computer. It seems more like he's done this out of depressive hopelessness and has factored other people into his own world-view, as in there's nothing for anybody in this world, it's completely futile so we might as well all be dead.

 

That's what I was thinking re taking all those people with you. If it was a dpressive episode, he must have been a bad case, a really bad case, which means proper "unannounced" screening would have found this guy out because appointed screenings can be panned for, you can plan your responses to hide your condition and he was intent on hiding it from the Airline.


I am sure this is a stressful job, so the fact there is not ongoing screening is amazing to me. I think Airtraffic controllers are screened, pilots should be too

 

They are.

Every 12 months sub 40 and every 6 post.

 

I think that he was extremely nihilistic and despairing and unfortunately has acted on these thoughts and brought them violently into physical reality in the way he has.

 

I was reading somewhere that this Andreas guy had not been screened since being hired in 2013.

Obviously they can't vouch for this screening cos this guy had real problems and they missed it totally and put him into a cockpit. Apparently his training was even interrupted because of this illness.

 

Unfortunately this is just one of these things that can happen. It really does my nut in (not you in particular sisu) when a situation like this happens and a load of legislation gets put into place to "prevent" one of these things (or in any industry i.e. police and their paperwork stopping them from doing their jobs or teachers and their paperwork) from happening again because of something that is totally unforeseen.

So what if there is technology, does the technology then override the pilots? and then what if technology goes wrong? or theres a nut job be it hacker, depressed remote controller of said technology or terrorist who use the technology to override the pilot.

As with people who say 2 pilots should be on board, possibly the case and i guess that would prevent the case of a depressed pilot from locking out his captain. In no way though would that stop a pilot who was determined to destroy the plane from happening. All they'd need to do is smash the other pilot over the head with something hard whilst the 3rd pilot has gone outside and thats it.

I think its just one of these unfortunate things that has happened and unfortunately humans are mentally fragile.

 

I wonder how you would screen for this type of thing. I know i've felt sad at times but i wouldn't call myself depressed. Also does it just involve asking questions which you would know the obvious answer to (if you wanted to keep your job)??

 

The law should be altered concerning testing, when you have people's lives in your hands like pilots do, they beed to be checked cos an aircrash unlike most other crashes, is in almost all cases certain death for everyone.

What happens on planes should be left be, preventing mentally ill people from flying planes should be the focus.

As for tech, there could be a solution. A simple comparison, not well thought out by myself would be.. say a plane preventing such a descent when not over a runway thought there are expections, something like this is not casually figured out on a football board I suppose.

 

Maybe there's something were not being told?

 

Not just pilots either. I know train drivers have been psychologically assessed since the Moorgate tube crash in the 70's, but nevertheless, if someone is absolutely deranged - and Christ knows what secrets and pressures some people have in their head, even if they were assessed recently - it's impossible to stop the worst case scenario.

All this talk about 'two in the cabin' - are all the cabin crew who go in whist the pilot goes for wee psychologically assessed too? It's estimated that one-in-four people will be treated for some sort of mental disorder within their lifetime: are we saying they can never pilot/drive a train/bus/taxi?

 

No there is no kneejerk reaction needed, what % all commercial pilots who ever flew a plane rammed them into the ground, 0.000 soomething %? Screening does need ot be improved, this guy was pretty ****ing ill.

The second one is difficult, a lot depends on the individual and the illness and circumstances, relapses ect But it should not be a No end of situation though,

 

It's weird, I should feel sorry for this guy but I don't. If he had had a heart attack and the plane went down I'd def feel sorry for him, but after reading the stuff in the media and the photos published, in my mind he's kinda monster-ish the impression I get. It's also ****ed up that he is getting so much attention and the actual other victims are being overlooked like.

Weird that.

 

Sells papers / gets hits innit