PARIS—The apparently deliberate act of a German pilot that caused the deaths of 150 people in France is leading to a broad re-examination of international airline-security rules, which allowed the pilot to lock his more senior crewmember out of the cockpit.
The cockpit door-locking system, which was designed after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US, was intended to prevent suicidal terrorists from seizing control of jetliners, but may have had the unintended consequence of allowing a single pilot to do the same.
“We are absolutely headed to a re-evaluation of the system,” said Robert Ditchey, an aviation-safety expert and former airline executive. “This is now an issue of how we keep mass murderers out of the cockpit.”
In response to the revelations about the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, the German Aviation Association announced on Thursday that all German carriers had agreed to new procedures, similar to those already in effect in the US, that would require two people in a plane’s cockpit at all times.
Several other carriers—including Air Canada, EasyJet, Norwegian Air Shuttle and Icelandair—announced similar changes in protocol.
French authorities said Andreas Lubitz, the German copilot of the flight from Barcelona, Spain, to Duesseldorf, Germany, on Tuesday kept the cockpit door locked after the pilot left, presumably to use the restroom. The pilot could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder pounding on the door after Lubitz purportedly set the aircraft on a deadly descent into the French Alps.
Investigators said Lubitz ignored radio calls and could be heard breathing normally as the aircraft went on a fairly steep descent from its 38,000-foot cruising altitude to about 5,000 feet, while passengers were screaming as they presumably saw the mountains looming and watched the pilot frantically trying to re-enter the cockpit.
European authorities, along with the chief executive of Germanwings parent Lufthansa, said that nothing in Lubitz’s background could explain his behavior. The 27-year-old pilot had no known association with extremist or terrorist groups, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the news had given the tragedy “a new, simply incomprehensible dimension…. Something like this goes beyond anything we can imagine.”
The dead included three Americans, the last of whom was identified by the State Department on Thursday as Robert Oliver. It provided no further details, but he was described in news reports as a Barcelona resident who worked for Spanish clothing company Desigual.
Half of the victims were German, including 16 students and two teachers from a high school in the northern town of Haltern Am See.
“I am asking myself, when is the nightmare going to end?” the town’s mayor, Bodo Klimpel, said on Thursday at a news conference that was broadcast live in Germany. “It is even much, much worse than we had thought.” In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the aviation industry and US law-enforcement officials decided that cockpit doors would have to be hardened and locked securely to thwart a repeat. At the time, experts knew that the system would have to be tamper-proof or it would not ensure an end to hijackings.
“We discussed the unintended consequences of leaving a single pilot in the cockpit and we did an analysis of the greater risk, a suicidal pilot or a terrorist,” said Michael Barr, a US air-safety expert and former accident investigation instructor at the University of Southern California. “The decision was a terrorist was the greater risk. We don’t want to reopen that door now.”
Los Angeles Times/TNS