AviationCalls for rethinking cockpit door security policy

Following the 9/11 attacks, the European Air Safety Agency (EASA) and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), in an effort to make hijackings more difficult, told commercial airlines to adopt systems which would prevent the takeover of passenger planes. “The systems differ according to each plane and airline to avoid a standard and prevent would-be terrorists from knowing how they work from one carrier or plane to another,” said an aviation specialist to Agence France‑Presse. Germanwings planes require an access code to open a cockpit door from the outside, but the doors could also be manually locked from inside the cockpit.

News that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz of the Germanwings flight 4U95251 deliberately locked the flight captain out of the cockpit as part of what is now considered a murder-suicide case, has raised concerns over whether the post-9/11 cockpit door safety policy is too secure, posing a more serious threat to civil aviation than terrorism.

The International Business Times reports that European airlines have now introduced a policy requiring a second crew member to be in the cockpit at all times. The two-pilot system is expected to add another layer of safety. “If you think about the mindset of a pilot wanting to deliberately crash an aircraft, having another person sitting in the cockpit may make them rethink their actions,” said Dr. Anil Padhra, senior lecturer in aviation studies at Kingston University.

Padhra later added, though, that the Germanwings flight 4U95251 incident could still have occurred even if airlines required two people in the cockpit at all times. “Possibly, because if the pilot wanted to deliberately crash the aircraft — and wanted to do so even with a senior cabin crew member inside the cockpit — what he could have done is physically abused the cabin crew member and incapacitated him,” she said.

The recovery of the plane’s Black Box voice recorder revealed that the captain tried to kick the cockpit door down, but the door was too strong. Some in the industry now say that the Germanwings incident highlighted to problems with cockpit doors that can be locked from the inside, and that consideration should be given to allow the door to be opened from the outside in certain circumstances.

Padhra is not convinced that rolling back the locked door policy is the best solution moving forward. “If you change that, you are removing a layer of safety that prevents passengers from getting into the cockpit,” she said. “It’s a question of which way you go — do you go to the left or do you go to the right? It’s a difficult one.”

On whether suicidal pilots are a greater risk than terrorism, “The reality is that if you speak to many of the aviation safety experts in the industry, they will tell that the threat of terrorism or inappropriate action from passengers is far, far greater than the threat of a pilot acting alone in a cockpit to deliberately crash the aircraft,” Padhra said.