“I hope some attorneys will chime in. From what I have heard so far, at least in the US, it would be nearly impossible for an airline to get off the hook using this line”
The PR issue is a much bigger priority than the inevitable lawsuits. 150 wrongful deaths will have a knowable maximum cost. You pay off all the families at a few million apiece. It’s not that high a cost for a multinational corporation of this size. But when it comes to PR, their brand and thus their whole multi-billion-dollar company is on the line here.
Where PR is concerned, whether this act was within or outside the pilot’s work doesn’t matter. If he is a murderous monster, they hired the murderous monster. Demonizing him doesn’t help them at all. They put him at the controls.
Guarantee you they are already working on spin, to make it look like this in not their fault, Hanna. They’ll be blaming everyone else before they accept any responsibility. And the reality is, they should be looking at changing hiring practices and procedures, in the interest of safety. You will never find any major airline pilots in the US flying large equipment with as little time as Germanwings hires.pilots at. Most people have several thousand hours.
I agree with Xiggi about 24/7 news coverage. They’ll put anything on the air, as long as it keeps an audience. I also agree with air traffic control being the limiting factor as far as pilotless aircraft for passengers. Don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. There are so many things that can go wrong, that you need a couple sets of eyes in the cockpit to prevent a larger problem. Funny, thirty years ago, my Dad warned me about having a really short career, because we were going to be completely replaced by computers. Not happening.
On another note, I finally read a report that the crew tried the emergency access code, and was denied access by the copilot. If that report is accurate, I can’t see any other possibility to consider, except for a purposeful crash. That would be completely damning, and there would be no case for incapacitation, or involvement by someone else. IF the report is accurate.
“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’s my opinion that the flying public has as much a vested interest in finding out why the plane crashed as do pilots. If you are not interested then just don’t watch or read anything about it.
I have yet to hear any report of this incident having to be retracted due to inaccuracies by any news media.
^
Yes we do … ultimately. Was the month long 24/7 coverage of the Malaysia plane necessary? Has it helped understand what might have happened any better? They could have dropped the story within 48 hours!
The point is not about getting the information as much as when do we need it. The plane has crashed. Everyone is dead. While it is important to learn from this tragedy, chances are that the solutions (possible) will hardly come from Wolf or Nancy, and the army of experts that have blocked the airwaves with speculation.
The fact that the reports culled by Bild or the Welt are accurate is not really important. They’d be just as timely in the next days or … months.
Fwiw, all that is needed to move this story to the backburner is … another tragedy.
" I have yet to hear any report of this incident having to be retracted due to inaccuracies by any news media"
Oh yeah, I’m sure the news media are going to be the first ones to retract any inaccuracies and errors on their part. They haven’t retracted anything, so therefore, all the reporting must be 100% accurate, right? Let’s start with a basic concept, calling the crew the pilot and copilot. Patrick Smith, of “Ask the Pilot”, says it perfectly:
“For starters, the whole “pilot” and “copilot” thing is getting out of hand. I was letting it go in deference to the more serious and tragic aspects of this crash, but my patience has expired. People: there are two pilots in the cockpit, the captain and the first officer. The latter is also known as the copilot. Copilots are not apprentices; they take off, land, and otherwise fly the airplane just as much as captains do. Sometimes, even, they are senior to and more experienced than the captain. They do not, as the BBC described it a few days ago, “steer the plane during the pilot’s breaks, or if he or she became ill.” That a line like that made it into print ought to be really, really embarrassing for an organization as respected as the BBC.” And all the rest of them.
“The point is not about getting the information as much as when do we need it. The plane has crashed. Everyone is dead. While it is important to learn from this tragedy, chances are that the solutions (possible) will hardly come from Wolf or Nancy, and the army of experts that have blocked the airwaves with speculation.”
For sure. The solutions will come from people who have worked for decades at improving safety in the airline industry. The unions (believe it or not), safety organizations, the investigators and engineers that make this their lives work. Training and hiring departments, professional standards, and companies that will be forced to spend the money for safety upgrades. Policies, procedures, all written in the blood of the crew and passengers of Germanwings Flight 9525, sadly. We learn from almost every disaster.
“The latter is also known as the copilot. Copilots are not apprentices; they take off, land, and otherwise fly the airplane just as much as captains do.”
I haven’t seen anyone on this thread describe the co-pilot as an apprentice. I also have not seen that description in the NYT. If you prefer, I am happy to call the co-pilot from now FO.
Newspaper’s retract inaccurate reports all the time as do broadcast networks.
Besides the BBC’s inaccurate description of what a FO does and referring to them as a co-pilot - what else have the news organizations gotten wrong?
I think what has put a bee in your bonnet is that you are a pilot and this crash was caused solely by a pilot.
You’re cracking me up, emily, you didn’t even carefully read my post. I admit, I am also often guilty of that. My point is not to criticize what posters on here have repeated, but the fact that the news organizations (not just BBC) can’t even get a basic fact right.
And just to repeat the earlier point that you didn’t get, a first officer (or FO) is also referred to as a copilot, so feel free to refer to this guy as a copilot, it is correct. But the guy sitting in the left seat is the CAPTAIN, not the pilot. They are both pilots.
If all you are left with is criticizing the media for interchanging words have at it. I think it is obvious, to even the most casual observer, that the FO/co-pilot and not the Captain was at the controls when the plane crashed. Also, most everyone, when the media is calling one the Pilot and the other the Co-pilot, knows who they are referring to.
None of that petty minutia, or anything else the media does to simplify things for their viewers ( like calling a switch a button, for example,) changes the fact that the FO deliberately crashed the plane.
As more evidence is released, it looks likely that he did deliberately crash the plane. But yes, details matter. Getting it right matters. You should read the aviation forums, gagging over the mistakes. Things that to you are trivial, but to pilots, eye rolling mistakes. If they weren’t in such a hurry to get the story out there, they could check their facts and be accurate. You may think that reporting things inaccurately doesn’t matter, but they lose credibility with people who understand what they should be talking about when they take the lazy way. I suspect you would have a “bee in your bonnet” if you were listening to a news report about government officials, and they were making assumptions and basic mistakes, would you not? Of course I’m saddened by the fact that people who are already afraid to fly, are now also afraid of the unlikely possibility that a pilot would crash the airplane intentionally. And that people who suffer from depression (in other jobs) are going to be even further discriminated against by their employers, and maybe not seek the help they need.
I sometimes think that if I lost my medical certificate, I’d be interested in being an FAA aircraft accident investigator, though I’d have a terrible time with the human tragedy aspect. That is one thing we surely do right in the US. We determine what is actually the truth, no guesses, and it changes the way we operate. Major airlines in the US have an incredible safety record, and it’s not because of random chance, its because of getting the details right.
BD, If i got my panties in a twist over minor inaccuracies or blantent falsehoods being reported in the media re anything to do with government or policies I’d be in a constant state of aggravation.
I still don’t know what the media got wrong in this case, besides your examples of calling the Captain pilot and other minutia. Everyone knew exactly once the cockpit voice recorder was recovered along with the data from Flightradar24 what happened. I don’t see anything wrong with the media reporting on those facts when they learned about them.
The only thing that really matters regarding this crash is that we know what caused it, that lessons will be learned from it and steps will be taken to protect against this from happening in the future - though nothing is 100% foolproof.
Past aviation disasters have shown required payouts to be very complicated despite the adoption of international laws. There is a cap on them of about USD150,000, regardless of liability.
However, damages are also recognized as real and can vary even if the airline is not found criminally liable.
Interestingly enough, Germans aren’t too partial to litigation and will probably get less than other passengers. American victims almost always get more.
emily, I could spend all day giving you a list of the inaccuracies, and you would either ignore my list, or call it minutia. Right? If you would like me to, when the accident report comes out, I could give you a very long list of the mistakes. Starting with, how did they know the captain used a crash axe to try to get in? Did he say, “Give me the crash axe?” How can they tell what that what was used against the door wasn’t a fire extinguisher, or something else metal? It would be very unusual to have a crash axe in an A320 that wasn’t in the cockpit. Did he take it out with him to go to the bathroom? That would be impossibly weird. But I know that you will trivialize anything whatsoever that I say. Been there, done that, too tired right now to start a long list.
And I’m glad that you agree with me that it is important to know exactly what the cause was, what we can learn from it, and what we can do to prevent it in the future. It’s great that we actually agree, tom1944 would be pleased!
I don’t think we’re giving sufficient credit to Lufthansa for implementing the lessons learned from the Malaysian plane disappearance. Lufthansa senior management came out early, released quickly the information they were able to verify, and showed a pretty decent amount of transparency. Some of pointed out errors that a non-pilot exec made in his press conference, but the real story was not what specific words were used, but rather that a CEO was out there doing the press briefing and being accountable instead of some mid level guy.
And Busdriver, I recognize you want all facts before you have a conclusion, but frankly I agree with a previous poster that when the CEO says on international TV that their pilot deliberately crashed the plane, then you can bet that is in fact what happened. They’d already admitted he had mental issues that they knew about. Therefore, it can’t have been that they were trying to shift blame. There’s no way to shift blame when a pilot that has both medical and emotional issues that the airline knew about, and the airline put him in the cockpit anyway. They’re worried about their brand, and they trying to help their brand by acting the opposite of Malaysia Air.
I’m curious about that, @hayden. From what you saw, the CEO (or someone else at the company) admitted that he had mental and emotional issues that they knew about? Because all I have seen was that they said he was a model pilot and that they had no idea about any medical or mental issues. Are you sure you aren’t confusing what they found out, after the crash? I would be really surprised if they admitted culpability, as from what I saw, it looked like they were just trying to blame it on him, and said they didn’t know a thing about his problems. Are you certain?
Edited to add, I just listened to CNN one minute ago, which reported that Lufthansa said they had no indication that he had any medical or mental conditions. Where did you hear differently?
Haven’t read this whole thread yet, but have been reading the discussion on one of my professional listservs as many of my colleagues (and I used to myself in the past) have performed FAA evaluations on pilots.