Rogue Pilots Have Become One of the Biggest Threats to Airline Safety

[Winthrop]

In ROTC in September 2001 I suggested the airlines hand every passenger a knife, on the theory that nobody then has an advantage. They locked the cockpit instead. Andrew Tangel’s piece in the Journal is the invoice. Flying is up 37 percent over twenty years and fatalities are down 35, so the deliberate crash now looks large: at least 800 deaths since 2005 that U.S. officials suspect or have confirmed as pilot-caused. Germanwings is the confirmed one. Malaysia 370, China Eastern, and Air India are the arguments. The peg is flydubai on September 30, an axe, a captain who could still open the door, and a first officer Oman Air had already taken off the line. Boeing has talked about airplanes that refuse the instruction. It has not built one. The locked door was designed for the cabin, not the guy with the tiller. WSJ Article

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

This is an interesting case of what happens when you try and prevent very rare events. The unintended consequences can easily become the dominant negative and worse than what you were trying to prevent in the first place.

I suppose autonomous jetliners with the possibility of remote override are the fix. Just take the humans in the cockpit out of the loop.

Waymo rides are now 10X safer than cars with human drivers.