Okay, look. No. NO. We’re not doing this. I’ll tell you why we’re not doing this.
2. Germanwings Flight 9525
3. LAM Mozambique Airline Flight 470
In each of these flights, one of the two pilots waited until the other one left for a restroom break or whatever and locked the door behind them. They then either set the autopilot to steer the plane into terrain or put it into a dive deliberately. Two of the three happened after 9/11, when airlines made a concerted effort to make it more difficult to get into the cockpit. Therefore, the other pilots on Flights 9525 and 470 could not get through the door to stop the inevitable.
Those are the ones that we know for sure happened that way. Malaysia Airline 370 could have gone down due to that, but we don’t know for obvious reasons. You can’t do this sort of thing on a commercial flight with only one person behind a door no one can’t get through.
I mean, Jesus, fucking “Airplane!” gives you a good reason for why you can’t just have one person in the cockpit. That person gets sick and a hundred passengers are screwed.
You can’t keep making everybody take off their goddamn shoes even though nobody’s made a shoe bomb for two decades and then just shrug off that having only one person in a securely locked cockpit is a problem. A big one. The plane’s computer could take off, fly, and land all by itself and there should *still* be more than one person in that cockpit, both to make sure nothing goes wrong with the plane and as a redundancy from one pilot becoming physically or mentally incapacitated. One pilot goes to the restroom, and at the very least *someone* should be in there with the other pilot.
This is making me think of FedEx Flight 705. A flight engineer with the airline decided to take his own life by taking over a flight using bludgeoning weapons to simulate the blunt force trauma from a crash. So he boards a cargo flight with a three-man crew as a deadhead passenger. It’s just the four of them. He was supposed to be a member of that crew, but wasn’t allowed and needed to change his plans. But if he had been, it would have been him against two other men, alone in the cockpit, and as the flight engineer he would have turned off the CVR and crashed the plane, hopefully leaving no evidence of his crime.
He still boarded the flight before the crew even got there, and turned off the CVR. The flight engineer, Andy Peterson, noticed and turned it back on, assuming it was a mistake. But once he, captain Dave Sanders, and First Officer Jim Tucker were in the air, their passenger removed a hammer from a guitar case he brought with him and proceeded to attack the crew. They all fought back. It was three against one, even if that one was determined and armed, not just with a hammer but with a speargun and other blunt instruments. The crew sustained very serious injuries, and yet Jim Tucker - who previously flew during the Vietnam War - took control of the plane and proceeded to fly the DC-10 like something out of “Top Gun,” fast and twisting and tossing their attacker off his feet. He flew that plane faster than it was meant to go. DC-10s are not supposed to move the way he made that plane move in order to save his crewmates. And then somehow, as Sanders and Peterson restrained the attacker, Sanders safely landed the plane.
If there had been only one man in that cockpit, the attacker would have been able to carry out his plan.
Only one pilot in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft is NOT SAFE. For many, many, MANY reasons.
“But we’re having staffing problems!”
Huh, weird. It’s almost as if you’ve put airline pilots under enormous stress, not accommodated for the fact an older generation of pilots are close to retirement, and depended for decades on pilots with flight experience gained in the military they’re not getting anymore thanks to drones. That’s all on you, assholes.
