When an airplane goes down, it usually takes a long time before we know what happened. So it’s shocking on many levels that we already seem to be zeroing in on what happened to Germanwings flight 9525 just last week. The circumstances surrounding what appears to have been a brutal mass-murder have created a lot of questions, many focusing on mental illness. Mental illness is something that doesn’t get discussed enough, and this crash is just another in a long line of opportunities to try to find a way to better deal with this problem.
What we know for sure is that Germanwings 9525 was peacefully cruising at altitude when the captain left the cockpit. The first officer then put the aircraft into a relatively steep descent and aimed for the ground. When the captain tried to come back in through the locked, reinforced door, he couldn’t. The first officer had the ability to override anyone trying to get into the cockpit, and he did. Meanwhile, the first officer sat there, breathing regularly but saying nothing. As the captain repeatedly tried to get in, the airplane kept descending. Soon after, the full force of the aircraft struck a mountain and the aircraft was smashed into pieces, along with the remains of all those on board.
When any aircraft crashes, the natural question to ask is… how could we have prevented this? (Unless you’re a cable news network, in which case the natural question to ask is… how can I get better ratings by exploiting this?) Usually it’s something concrete to address, like a mechanical fix, new equipment, or better training. But this… this is different.
Yes, there are some concrete things that could be done here. For example, years ago, airlines in the US adopted the policy that there should always be two people in the cockpit at any given time. If one of the pilots has to leave to go to the bathroom, then a flight attendant must go up there. That wasn’t the case in Europe (though it’s quickly changing). But would that have stopped the first officer from plunging the aircraft into the ground? Maybe a flight attendant could have stopped him. Or maybe it would have allowed a flight attendant to open the door to let others in, and they could have stopped him. Maybe. It’s certainly a rule that should be in place because it can only help, but this is treating the symptom and not the cause of the problem.
The real problem here is mental illness. Now, we don’t know this person’s motivation for doing what he did, but the list of options isn’t very long. It could have been a suicide attempt that took everyone else along for the ride. It could have been an attempt at martyrdom, twistedly “fighting” for a cause that somehow, in his mind, justified the murder of so many people. Or maybe there was someone onboard he hated so much that he was willing to kill everyone else, including himself, to end that person’s life. The reason doesn’t matter. What matters is that no matter what the reason, this crash was caused by mental illness.
You would naturally expect that airlines would have strict standards regarding mental illness during hiring. After all, a pilot has a tremendous responsibility. It’s the kind of job that should require a certain level of mental fitness. For many airlines, that is something evaluated during hiring, but it can’t end there. Pilots at a major airline tends to be there until the government makes them retire. Mental illness can show itself at different times in a person’s life. There should be regular attention paid to identifying and treating illness throughout the career of a pilot, and everyone else. That does not seem to happen in the airline industry.
We do need to keep this in perspective. You can count on your fingers the number of crashes that have been caused by a pilot deliberately plunging an aircraft into the ground. But those incidents are a small subset of the number of tragedies that occur around the world every day due to mental illness. Just look at all the school shootings that happen in the US. So even if the number of crashes caused by mental illness isn’t great, it is still a big problem that needs to be addressed. Everyone reading this probably knows someone who has a mental illness of some sort. As for me, remember my trip to the Bay Area in February? That was to go to my younger cousin Danny’s funeral after he committed suicide. This is something that has impacted all of us in one way or another.
So what we can do? We can make treatment for mental illnesses readily accessible. Make sure everyone knows that mental illnesses are real illnesses and that that people can get help. Make sure health plans include good mental illness coverage. And do everything possible to eliminate the stigma involved with someone being considered mentally ill. The more we talk about it and the easier we make it to get treatment, then the better chance we have of avoiding awful, murderous incidents like the one we just witnessed last week.
Will this guarantee that something like this Germanwings crash never happens again? No. There are very smart people with mental illnesses who are very good at hiding them from others, and the risk, no matter how remote, is always there. But the more we do to make people understand that a mental illness isn’t their fault and is treatable, the better chance we have of helping them before they can do harm to themselves or others.
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65 Comments on "Thinking About Mental Illness and the Crash of Germanwings Flight 9525"
At least in the US this is handled by having the employee go to a company hired doctor, who then reports to a Medical Responsibility Officer. (At least I think that’s the title) The MRO then can discuss the results with the employee and/or take action such as suspending the employee from duty or having a restricted workload.
Turning this over to a computer to word scan a file is a horrible idea.
What happens when a doctor discusses a long ago suicide attempt? Something like this makes it less likely, not more likely that someone would get help.
Great post. I don’t know how to create a safety net for people who have mental illness to get help. . . and then? I mean this guy’s career was as a pilot and apparently if you are mentally ill what happens next?? Can you get treatment, or is it time for a new career? What is the threshold, testing? I have no answers, but its just sad (and as someone who flies a bit scary).
One of the first questions I would ask is… what psych meds was this pilot prescribed? It is not well known, but if you read up on the side effects on the various medications, you will be shock on how dangerous they can be regardless of their Importance .
A few good sources include Medline.com & drugs.com. It’s time to get educated.
I agree with Sean.
Many types of drugs can have severe side effects. They don’t even have to be meds being taken for depression/psysch reasons.
In a recent article in Discover magazine, they show how a woman taking steroids for asthma almost commits suicide.
(the tag line for the article is below).
VITAL SIGNS
From Asthma to Suicidal Thoughts?
A healthy, stable woman with asthma suddenly finds herself considering suicide despite landing a dream job in a city she loves. What went wrong?
Be careful here – don’t conflate suicide with criminal activity even if mental illness is involved in both situations.
Mass murder is criminal activity.
We don’t yet know if this is mass murder.
There is an investigation process that should be followed. Prematurely hanging the pilot in this case is a disservice to that process and to anyone involved.
We want instant answers, but there will be a very complete report that will be issued by the European authorities. Until that report was issued, this is an airplane crash and the reason for that crash is unknown.
Yes and no – More complicated tests have enough questions and “failsafes” built into the questions and variances of the questions that you can’t trick it but giving the “correct” answers, or what one would expect.
I have a relative that’s a psychologist – and one rainy afternoon I volunteered to take the MMPI test. I answered them all in the “right” way but was very surprisingly at how it parsed out my already known personality traits..
A – your comments are treading line of being offensive to those of us who struggle with mental illness.
Second. This is such a tutchy issue & it must be handled with care.
On a personal note – I know a family where there was abuse in the home & both children mentioned directly or indirectly to me they wanted to kill them selves. Granted this was almost two decades ago & I don’t know what happened to either one. I need to add that both of them were going blind at a young age do to anaridia, a rare genetic disorder that causes cateracs & glockoma early in life.
I agree with Nick Barnard but I think this should not be limited to airline pilots. I think this should be the policy for all safety-sensitive positions at least in the transportation including railroad engineers, bus drivers and truck drivers. True, someone in the cockpit of a large commercial airliner puts more lives at risk and can do more damage but a deranged driver of a tanker truck full of fuel or hazmat can make life plenty miserable in a large metro area.
Well stated, and well written. Thank you
Curly – I can’t say I know the answer to those questions.
another speculative article; the paragraph beginning “The real problem here….” is judgmental; it would have been best left out making the article at best benign. Does Crancky need to weigh in on everything?
It’s Cranky’s blog, which he graciously stimulates conversation for free, so yes, he gets to to weigh in on anything he wants.
Not only that, if he makes an error this is the best forum to correct without being combative. This should be about education & not about passing judgement.
I’m all about computers, I think they’re great things. But not every potential problem can be forseen and have software engineers design around it.
My thought would be that anytime there is an anomaly as detected by on-board systems, an on-the-ground pilot on standby would instantly see everything, have full comms with the cockpit, and have the ability to take control at the flip of a switch. The added benefit of this system is that a “mission control” on the ground could have multiple staff that could concur to allow the override (not a single human decision), as well as specialists in various systems to assist with diagnostics, similar to NASA’s mission control.
This would have prevented 9/11 as well, btw…
… Unless and until the terrorists or suicidal/murderous people train their way into those control centers.
Securing a single control center is a heck of a lot easier than securing thousands of airplanes…
I’d rather have multiple distributed commands (In the cockpits) than one or two distributed commands.
Its a standard in the computing (and other) industries, to distribute the points of failure. You want to have at least one main site, plus a backup site.
I don’t like the idea of taking the pilots out of control. How many people commit suicide with their cars and take someone else with them? We still let people drive cars and the requirements to get a driver license are much, much lower than those to get a pilot’s license.
Cranky, would love to see you write about a system like this, which I think would get attention from all of the major players…
Tory – I don’t know that there’s even enough info to research at this point. But it would be interesting to consider. So, so many issues, of course. But that’s always going to be the case with proposals that require big change.
Thanks Cranky. The ultimate value would be increased safety (even separate from terrorism/suicide/etc) and reduced costs from only needing one pilot on flights instead of two. Might have prevented/saved MH370 too. Certainly encryption and override protocols can be worked through – we could use our nuclear launch system as one unhacked security model to consider. It would be a big “moonshot” type project – not sure if it would be government driven or by the airplane manufacturers.
Perhaps the cockpit door should just open into the forward lav. That’d allow flight crews to reach the lav without having to do that dance up front.. (Although oy, that probably has enough security issues with it as well.
pddee – Adding another lav in the cockpit is a non-starter just because the airlines want to maximize the number of seats they can put onboard. That just takes away space they could be selling. Having a direct access into the lav from behind is interesting. But yeah, probably a lot to think through!
You don’t need another dedicated lav. You just need a second cockpit door aft of the forward lav.
Lav is used by pax unless flight crew needs it, in which case the rear cockpit door is closed and the front one opened.
Oh and as a follow up on the fears those with mental illness face about being labeled, ostracized, and careers ruined, they are absolutely right to fear that. Then that fear in itself often provides more fuel to the fire that is the mental illness and a vicious cycle begins.
Well stated.
As I read your above remarks, I remembered an issue involving the oldest daughter of someone I know who suffers from debilitating anxiety & has been dealing with this since she was about 18. The unfortunate thing about this was she ended up in some religious cult & they exploited her situation & stated that her mental illness was a result of devil possession. Thankfully her mom got her help.
I point this out to illustrate one example all be it extreme how easily the mentally ill can be taken advantage of & it must change now
Eric, thank you for saying this.
Not directly related to mental health, but I recall when the FDIC strengthened their protections against people with criminal pasts from working in the banking industry, it caught people with small petty crimes that they committed decades ago as a teenager. One man lost his job over stealing $10 thirty or so years ago. We have to be mindful of regulations that don’t have any flexibility in them.
A lot of talk about, “Now pilots need to be psychologically evaluated”. Ok but who is going to psychologically evaluate the Psychologist? There’s a true story in the airline business that Delta for years during the interview process had each pilot psychologically evaluated. Many potential great candidates were turned down simply by the Psychologist. A few years later that psychologist put a bullet in his head. Point being we can’t go down that slippery slope of creating a “Minority Report” pilot career environment. Fortunately things like this are rare in the business.
For what it’s worth those smaller planes can do quite a bit less damage than a 757 or even a DC-9.
Sent from my computer that moonlights as a phone. Please forgive any misspellings or terseness.
I couldn’t agree more, MeanMeosh. With adequate support (including a pervasive societal commitment and action to help), almost every person with mental illness can become a valuable and valued member of society.
Thank you for creating a forum for this discussion, Cranky. I am very sorry for your cousin’s pain and your family’s grief at his death.
You have a point there. I guess making sure that all pilots and even the crew should have like a certification that they are not mentally ill before the go on-duty. It’s not the real big time solution but it can help prevent these types of accidents. Damage control as they said. And then, follow through. Examining continuously will really help in the evaluation if a crew is fit to work or not.
Kelty, thank you for writing and sharing this.
according to Ockham’s Razor (and also according to Bayes Theorem) the most likely hypothesis is that the co-pilot was unconscious, and the plane descended by remote control.
If the plane descended by remote control, it is then certain that the co-pilot was disabled intentionally, e.g. by a gas piped into the cabin.
The story about the mentally ill co-pilot is likely to be a ruse – and as phony as the story that appeared in the press couple of weeks later, than the co-pilot may have put laxatives in the pilot’s coffee, to make him go to the toilet.
True.. But how does Occam’s razor account for the reported statement that the first officer was denying the captain entrance to the cockpit?
By the only accounts we have (which are largely false if we assume that the first officer was not involved in crashing the plane), the first officer said nothing and did not reply. On this evidence, I would assume that he was unconscious as the most likely option.
There may have been accounts that the first officer locked the door with a time lock. How credible are these accounts?