Germanwings Tragedy: How to protect against mentally ill pilots?

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/03/28/germanwings-tragedy-how-to-protect-against-mentally-ill-pilots/

by ivank • 11 years ago

58 90 11 years ago

blogs.law.harvard.edu

ptaipale• 11 years ago

I like that comment about crash axe vs. two quarters and a dime and a set of car keys.

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.

ghshephard6• 11 years ago

Agreed - In california, a lot (most?) of the gun ranges will not let you go by yourself, you need to have a buddy. Now, obviously there is zero ability for a bystander to prevent you from doing something harmful with a firearm, should you chose to do so, but the mere presence of someone else, radically reduces the chance that you will do so.

fnazeeri• 11 years ago

Source?

shiggerino3• 11 years ago

If he can’t earn close to $150,000/year he won’t be able to pay this order, in which case he will join the roughly 1 in 7 child support payors who are imprisoned at some point for nonpayment (for not paying the court-ordered amount, Massachusetts offers the pilot a felony conviction, which means he won’t have an ATP certificate anymore and therefore won’t be able to work again, plus up to 10 years in prison).

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...

SeanDav• 11 years ago

I have no idea if the USA has a debtors jail or not, but I don't think this is about going to jail for being in debt, it is about going to jail for breaking a court imposed order.

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.

mattmanser• 11 years ago

Which is for non-payment of debt, which is debtors prison.

mg19823• 11 years ago

It's a distinction without a difference if the court is ordering you to pay money that don't have and can't get.

bayesianhorse2• 11 years ago

The US doesn't have debtor's prison per se. Only certain kinds of obligations, which are already associated with "jailable" offenses can result in something that looks a lot like debtor's prison. In some cases not being able to pay a debt really should carry a jail sentence, for example in case of clearly fraudulent behavior.

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.

happyscrappy2• 11 years ago

I love how a mentally ill European kills loads of people because the EU didn't mandate proper cockpit control and the top comment is about how bad the US is. As Europe unravels they hold on to their smugness ever tighter, but the thing is, aside from being a drag on the world economy, no one really cares what happens in Europe as long as they keep electing leaders who do the US's bidding.

jacquesm4• 11 years ago

And I love how you use every chance you get to harp on 'Europe disintegrating' and other bull-shit. The comment was in reference to a segment in the article which related to the situation in the US.

shiggerino3• 11 years ago

Why don't you just show us the FAR that mandates proper cockpit control next to the supposedly inadequate equivalent JAR?

dang• 11 years ago

Please don't post comments baiting political opponents (or continents). That isn't what HN is for. When a comment is wrong, either refute it substantively or downvote it and move on.

amix• 11 years ago

I think this could be prevented by removing humans from the cockpit and let computers take over. Computers are already controlling most of the things inside an airplane. If this isn't possible, then the flight software should at least have protection against malicious pilots (this would protect against the mentally ill and also against terrorism (e.g. 9/11)). Basically, the planes could have failsafes to prevent malicious pilots from crashing them down or crashing them into things.

seanmcdirmid4• 11 years ago

Ya Get rid of the persons involved...i.e. Self flying planes. It will happen eventually, it is a much easier problem than self driving cars, and there are already planes that can take off and land themselves in certain conditions.

But this isn't really a huge frequent problem, just one that gets a lot of press.

acqq4• 11 years ago

Why stop there? The best way to get rid of persons involved is not flying the passengers.

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.

microtonal• 11 years ago

I think this could be prevented by removing humans from the cockpit and let computers take over.

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.

ghshephard6• 11 years ago

Unfortunately we're about 40-50 years out before an automated flight control system can reproduce the critical activities of a well-trained human team of pilots.

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.

moe3• 11 years ago

we're about 40-50 years out

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

mapt• 11 years ago

The question is at what point flight software can be demonstrated to have a small fraction of the failure rate that humans have.

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.

pfortuny• 11 years ago

This is very easy to imagine but needs quite a bit of testing. Human sensors are taken care of 16/7 approximately, not so with mechanical ones. A pilot can always say "I feel sick." A frozen sensor cannot.

thret3• 11 years ago

I found all of the divorce stuff terrifying. If a pilot is away 10-22 days a month for their full time job, then even if their spouse has an affair and wants a divorce they still lose everything because they are not home enough? How is that right?

ghshephard6• 11 years ago

Only if there are children involved.

joosters2• 11 years ago

Look at it from the perspective of the children. How can a single parent who is away for 10-22 days a month look after a child?

thret3• 11 years ago

Better to be raised by a liar and a cheat who is comfortable turning around and making unreasonable demands on their hard-working ex? And putting them in jail if they can't pay? NO.

Dylan16807• 11 years ago

That means they should pay child support if a divorce happens. The well-being of the child doesn't require large alimony payments.

andmarios• 11 years ago

The question should be how to protect mentally ill people. One does not have to be a pilot to harm himself and/or many others.

FranOntanaya2• 11 years ago

Perhaps any crew member should be able to switch on the autopilot from any part of the plane, then ground control or a timer would restore it.

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.

rwmj2• 11 years ago

Autopilot was switched on in this case. The problem was the pilot had adjusted the target height to be inside a mountain. (He'd specifically set it to 30 ft). Technically speaking the autopilot crashed the plane, albeit on the pilot's instruction.

FranOntanaya2• 11 years ago

My brain keeps blocking that bit -- apparently we can land rovers on Mars but we can't do collision checks on an airliner's autopilot.

rwmj2• 11 years ago

I'm embarrassed to say that I confused feet and meters. The autopilot was set to 100 ft, which is approximately 30 m. Source: http://uk.businessinsider.com/aviation-tracking-service-germ...

beggi• 11 years ago

You can be depressive or mentally ill without wanting to harm yourself or anyone else. Let's not blame the murder of 149 people on depression. The question really is, how to protect against malicious pilots?

acqq4• 11 years ago

As I was younger, it was normal to see the pilots in the cockpit from your seat while flying, if the cockpit door existed it wasn't even closed. Why are people so scared today from everything? My question is, do we even need to "protect" from everything? Accidents happen sometimes, flying in big planes is still safer than driving.

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?

icebraining3• 11 years ago

Somebody has to be responsible.

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.

happyscrappy2• 11 years ago

Europe will now use the same procedure as the the US never leaving less than two in the cockpit. Too late for the Germanwing passengers but at least they are implementing it after the fact.

frik2• 11 years ago

Europe no, some European airlines yes.

ex: Air Berlin and Niki yes, Lufthansa its sub-companies Germanwings, Austrian, etc. no. (source: exclusive CNN interview with Lufthansa boss)

johansch• 11 years ago

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/reversal-crash-hit-lufthan...

"* Lufthansa to require two people in cockpit at all times

* Reversal of earlier comments by CEO

* EU agency issues recommendation for European airlines"

moe3• 11 years ago

This is blown way out of proportion. Planes sometimes crash, such is life.

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

ck22• 11 years ago

Aren't 150 innocent civilians dying everyday in Syria from a mentally ill dictator? That's a 9/11 every month.

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.

pimentel• 11 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

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?

ck22• 11 years ago

BBC seems to be able to cover it almost daily. American "news" virtually never unless there is a talking point some politician is pushing.

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.

ExpiredLink• 11 years ago

Whataboutism - revealing explanation! Nowadays you need to be aware of all the rhetoric tricks or you get fooled.

ghostberry2• 11 years ago

Looking at the numbers, the mentally well have crashed many more aircraft on purpose than the mentally ill.

So, how to protect against mentally well pilots?

jsprogrammer• 11 years ago

What numbers are you looking at?

egwor• 11 years ago

interesting...do you have a source?

mg19823• 11 years ago

Forgive me, but crashing an aircraft on purpose excludes you from the sane club. The number is of mentally well people to do so is - and always will be - zero.

ghostberry2• 11 years ago

"Mentally ill" is not an insult you throw at people you don't like. It's a medical term.

dmritard96• 11 years ago

Will this change peoples attitudes towards fly by wire/remote pilots/drones? In theory, there should be a flight plan thats relatively straight forward and immediately upon unusual divergence from the plan you would think a remote pilot could peer in on what is going on and even override the controls... Obviously security concerns are important here.

acqq4• 11 years ago

The remote pilots fly the unmanned drones which aren't a big loss when something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong there too, just it's not a big loss and nobody reports that. "One drone crashed instead of flying around, so what? That's why they are unmanned and cheap, that's why we use them actually."

littletimmy• 11 years ago

Thus he has a child support and/or alimony order in place based on his $150,000/year pilot salary. If he can’t earn close to $150,000/year he won’t be able to pay this order, in which case he will join the roughly 1 in 7 child support payors who are imprisoned at some point for nonpayment (for not paying the court-ordered amount, Massachusetts offers the pilot a felony conviction, which means he won’t have an ATP certificate anymore and therefore won’t be able to work again, plus up to 10 years in prison).

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?

mg19823• 11 years ago

Wow - so close. How about: 'How on Earth is putting a man in prison remotely just or proportional'?

amelius• 11 years ago

Why not just allow ground control to open the cockpit door remotely?

icebraining3• 11 years ago

How can ground control know if the pilot locked out isn't being forced by someone to ask for it? If you're going to rely on his/her word, might as well give him/her direct access.

thesimon• 11 years ago

Because it opens yet another attack vector?

bayesianhorse2• 11 years ago

The only good thing that may come out of this tragedy is that suicide prevention gets taken more seriously.

Unfortunately, the opposite may also happen, with disastrous consequences for anyone who people suspect of having a depression.

cozzyd• 11 years ago

Yes, I'm sure the pilots will have better working conditions if they get rid of their unions...

corin_2• 11 years ago

63 comments and nobody else is shocked yet at "Airlines should be able to automatically fire divorce, custody, or child support lawsuit defendants"? (edit: sorry, one other person did mention it already)

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...

glogla• 11 years ago

Yes, it's kind of funny (and more than one kinds of sad) how the reaction to "sick person does something terrible because his life is miserable," is "hey let's make more people miserable".

macco• 11 years ago

Arghh. I can't even escape that tragedy on HN.

glomph• 11 years ago

I think this statement from Mind is pretty relevant:

"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"

tim333• 11 years ago

Yeah, Lubitz seems to have been quite an extreme case and not typical of the depressed. From the Daily Mail quoting his ex:

"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.

jacquesm4• 11 years ago

Shall we fire all the bus-drivers and train operators too that have families and that may be headed for divorce?

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.

quesera• 11 years ago

Philip writes for his regular readers, and that was almost certainly intentionally absurd.

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.

vermooten• 11 years ago

I couldn't possibly let my employers knows I suffer from the black dog, even though the very worst that could possibly happen is that some software would get delivered late.

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.'

downandout2• 11 years ago

Firing pilots because they are going through a divorce, as suggested by the author, seems a little extreme. CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) crashes such as this - whether accidental or intentional - can be eliminated by technology and hopefully will be soon. Airlines can complain about the cost all they want - the direct loss projection from this single incident is $350 million [1]. The cost of doing nothing is demonstrably greater than the cost of developing and deploying a CFIT prevention system.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-27/co-pilot-s...

sokoloff3• 11 years ago

I agree that we can make great strides against unintentional CFIT accidents, but don't think we can rely on tech to eliminate intentional CFITs.

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?

downandout2• 11 years ago

But you're implying that we can't make the aircraft smart enough to know that there is a fire and that cutting fuel is the right thing to do. I believe we can.

hitchhiker999• 11 years ago

Didn't the almost exact same thing happen 2 weeks ago? A plane did a nose dive (but that time recovered) - or ?

Germanwings Tragedy: How to protect against mentally ill pilots?

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