Well, I like the impulse to want to get all the facts. When I looked at the comments sections on some news sites, they were full of really obnoxious comments saying that this was undoubtedly Islamic terrorism (and that it was Obama’s fault, somehow). Now that seems a lot less likely, but that should teach us not to be too sure about anything. I suppose this could still count as an accident if the co-pilot were impaired by medication, for example.
Luckily for pharmaceutical insurance underwriters everywhere, many medications have warnings about the operation of machinery or motor vehicles, of which I am reasonably sure the A320 qualifies as.
Pilots know that any medication which can cause impairment makes them ineligible to fly. If that is the case, I don’t see that it makes him any less culpable. Before he even opened the medicine bottle, he would know that he was deliberately putting the passengers at risk. It may technically qualify as “an accident,” but I would put it in a completely different category than if he were incapacitated by a stroke or some other unforeseeable ailment. When Diane Schuler got drunk and high at the wheel while transporting five young children, then killed four of them and three others when she hit them head on while driving the wrong way on a freeway, calling that an accident seems almost purposely disingenuous. IMO, the same would go for this incident.
busdriver, I really appreciate your insight. As much as we’d all like answers right now (and can find them for any occasion, thanks to the “experts” who weigh in for the cameras), I also appreciate that you’re waiting for all the facts.
A German newspaper purports to have gotten a hold of a leaked transcript of the flight recorder data. According to this transcript, the passengers began screaming many minutes before the crash, not merely seconds prior as had been previously stated.
If this is true, that’s just almost unbearable to think about.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/29/europe/france-germanwings-plane-crash-main/
For alcohol, the FAA guidance is “8 hours from bottle to throttle”.
There are even guidelines for that little blue pill:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/faa-to-pilots-dont-fly-viagra/
“Six hours from Viagra to throttle.”
“When I looked at the comments sections on some news sites, they were full of really obnoxious comments saying that this was undoubtedly Islamic terrorism (and that it was Obama’s fault, somehow). Now that seems a lot less likely, but that should teach us not to be too sure about anything.”
What does the comment section have to do with the facts as reported? People write all sorts of crazy stuff in comment sections.
There was no credible source even speculating it might be terrorism except immediately after the crash which is very typical immediately following an incident of this kind. Within hours they had already determined it wasn’t terrorism.
The very sad fact is that this a “duck.”
I sheepishly confess that until the pilot’s name was revealed, we were making bets on whether the last words on the cockpit voice recorder were “Allahu Akbar”, like the Egypt Air suicidal crash.
This is pretty much human nature (at least among the less-well-educated or prone-to-conspiracy-theory types). We tend to assume the most “obvious” causes when we hear about some calamity. It was widely assumed that the Oklahoma City bombing was perpetrated by Islamic terrorists because of the World Trade Center attack a few years prior, and of course, the Islamists were just getting started, as they took down the World Trade Center a decade later. And of course there are still many people who believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 terror attacks, a claim which was widely debunked long before the US invaded Iraq two years later.
We all need to learn to wait to draw final conclusions, but it’s human nature to speculate. I just would prefer that reputable media outlets would avoid speculation like the plague and stick with the facts as they’re known.
I was thinking about this issue of the pilot trying to use the keypad, and whether there would be a load alarm in the cockpit when he did so. It seems to me that if there is a way to disable the keypad from the cockpit (i.e., if terrorists had taken over the passenger cabin and might have the code), then this might also disable the alarm. Would you really design it to have a loud repeated alarm if somebody had taken over the passenger cabin?
What I vaguely recall from law school is that the vicarious liability of an employer for unforeseeable intentional or criminal acts of an employee (such as that being alleged was committed by the co-pilot) may actually be eliminated or reduced. This is without regard to whether the doctrine of strict liability applies to airlines and common carriers for “accidents” and so forth.
Whereas if the airlines had reason to suspect (i.e., that it was reasonably foreseeable) that the co-pilot had problems with personal issues or mental illness that might have led to his intentional or criminal act, then it is again a different argument.
Some acts, such as this one, are so heinous that they are virtually impossible to foresee.
“Do you feel worse about this than the average Joe because you are a pilot and it hurts to think one of your own could do such a heinous thing?”
I’m sure that most pilots do @Nrdsb4, probably similar to how you would feel if you heard accusations that a medical professional had executed 150 innocent people, including so many kids. For any such accusation that someone is a murderer, particularly a mass murderer, I think you have to be dead certain to publicly conclude this. Remember Richard Jewel, the security officer who was tried by the media of the bombing in Atlanta, at the Olympics? He ended up being the hero, who had saved lives. The way they handled this crash was far different than we deal with aircraft accidents in the US. We investigate far longer before the NTSB starts making conclusions. The Asiana crash at SFO took a significant amount of time before they came out with the cause, though they had all the black boxes, and pilots there to tell the story. However, as the facts are coming out, I do believe it is likely that the first officer purposefully did this.
As a standard, most pilots absolutely do not want the manner of their death to be in an aviation accident, particularly with them at the controls. There is a large amount of pride/ego that most pilots have, and the last thing they would want is for someone to die or be injured with them at fault. The scrutiny that comes to your life after an accident is intense, and nobody would want it. However, there are the same cross section of messed up people that there are anywhere, it’s hard to screen all of them out. As @GMTplus7 surely knows, there are some BIG (meaning seriously obnoxious) personalities in the cockpit. When I was at American, there was a captain who put his wife through the wood chipper, at another airline, one who murdered his wife and burned her body. Really sad, she was a crewmember and a sweet lady. There are plenty of stories, however, I think depression and desire to commit suicide and murder is very rare in this group.
"There are even guidelines for that little blue pill:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/faa-to-pilots-dont-fly-viagra/
“Six hours from Viagra to throttle.” "
Probably for the flight attendants protection! 
“What I vaguely recall from law school is that the vicarious liability of an employer for unforeseeable intentional or criminal acts of an employee (such as that being alleged was committed by the co-pilot) may actually be eliminated or reduced. This is without regard to whether the doctrine of strict liability applies to airlines and common carriers for “accidents” and so forth.”
If that is correct, it would explain why the company was so eager to quickly announce that the first officer had purposefully crashed, and deny having any knowledge of his problems.
I saw a TV documentary about the AA pilot who fed his wife’s body in the wood chipper. Someone saw him operating the machine in the pouring rain-- the pilot wasn’t thinkly clearly that the urgency to operate a wood chipper in blinding rain wouldn’t seem suspicious.
Then there was the Fedex pilot who tried to kill the other pilots in the cockpit then crash the plane so his family would get the life insurance money. Terrible…
Actually, the blue pill warning has another legitimate reason. 6 hours gives a safety window that the drug is almost completely cleared out of the body, so no drug-related severe cardiac side effects could happen while the pilot is in the cockpit.
The woodchipper story is just gross. We were Irving not too far away from him, and me and my husband kept wondering if we had flown with that guy, but didn’t want to think about it too hard!
The FedEx guy was a real jerk. The three crew members were bashed in the head with a hammer, and never got their medicals back, though they are lucky to be alive. They did some superhuman things to get the aircraft on the ground. Not only was he trying to get the life insurance, he was trying to take out the sort facility in the hub, which could have killed hundreds.
Okay, I believe you about the blue pill, BB, but I prefer the theory that it takes away the pilots defense about why he couldn’t keep his hands to himself!
Along that line, there was a first officer at American who left the cockpit during a flight, had sex with a woman in the lav, and his defense was 'physiological needs". The union even defended him.
Can’t we blame the 24/7 media that demands minute-to-minute coverage to feed a rubbernecker crowd addicted to the Nancy Grace type of reporting? Fwiw, it is not a US problem despite CNN and its cousins, most German newspapers are posting minute by minutes updates.
The reality is that there are few if any reason to have continuing coverage of the crashes after they happened. The month long coverage of the Malaysia plane was simply senseless. Did we really need to hear about the (wasted) efforts to scout large swaths of ocean two weeks after the plane vanished?
And, lastly, the media does it because it … works. Don’t we really have nothing better to do than finding out the most minute details about a tragedy? Inasmuch as I completely understand that pilots such as Busdriver remain deeply interested in both the accident and the coverage, I am not sure why millions of couch potato turn away from Rachael Ray and Doctor Phil!
It would be nice for the government agencies to be able to have gag orders for the first 10 days. Worked for our government in a little town in Lybia. And still does.
How long will it be until we have unmanned commercial flights with pilots on the ground at their computers?
( along with robot flight attendants?)
The technology should be available for large scale development in the near future. It works for the military. Here’s the issue:
The main barrier to pilotless commercial aircraft operation is the primitive air traffic control system we have at present. Although controllers are provided with predictive as well as actual traffic information now, the system is completely human-driven.
Also, if we can’t track a plane like the Malaysia one, how do we expect to send instructions without interruption.