In light of the recent crash of a German-Wings airplane allegedly by the Co-Pilot in the French Alps, there is increased talk about placing a Flight attendant in the cockpit in the event one of the Pilots needs to leave for any reason.
I’m just a little curious about that strategy>
(1)How exactly will a flight attendant stop a trained pilot from crashing an airplane if he/she chooses to?
(2) If the pilot decides to crash the airplane and places the plane in a nose-dive how will anyone stop that action? yes there would be a struggle if the attendant realizes it. Considering that attendants are not trained pilots and would not readily know the nuances of flight patterns, including change of altitude as the one in the Alps which Authorities said was a controlled descent.
(3) Even if you overcome the latter , you are still dealing with another human being with human emotions, so you have just multiplied the problem instead of solving it.
It wasn’t long ago the idea of locked cockpit was front and center as the solution to the problem of passengers broaching the cockpit after September 11th, 2001.
One expert pilot on CNN admitted that the Industry did not foresee this becoming an issue., the question of the person in the cockpit being the person to fear,.
Of course they did not see this becoming an issue, this is symptomatic of how they go about arriving at solutions to problems, they react in knee-jerk fashion.
The human element is always going to present uncertainty issues, so too will the question now being debated of having people on the ground take over landing an aircraft in the event there is an issue of the kind which occurred in the French Alps.
Of course that too will have a magnitude of issues which could negatively impact passenger safety, including the mental state of the person/s so authorized to commandeer the aircraft from the ground.
The fact is that like everything else , air travel has uncertainty. Authorities can do their level best to fix problem as they occur, or try to head them off by continued evaluation.
Despite this, fixing one problem inadvertently creates others.
Like everything else, the airline industry will continue to use the whack-a-mole-concept of smacking problems as they pop up.
Nothing is infallible, unless we can get into the brain space of all actors and stay there, problems like these are here to stay.
Why do I have a feeling we are heading into territory where they control the mind of not just pilots ‚but everyone who boards an airplane?
Hmmm.….