Life Lessons from the German Air Disaster

That the world isn't fair is known to every human being who thinks. It may be our first insight into life. What child who ever complained, "That's not fair," wasn't told by some adult, "Life isn't fair"?

One sad example of how unfair life is concerns how much harder it is to do massive good than massive evil. One psychopath, in one hour, killed 149 innocent people aboard a Germanwings airliner. How many people will ever be able to do nearly as much good for 149 people in a lifetime?

With very few exceptions, good can only be achieved one by one by one. That's why, if you want your name remembered by many people, you have a far better chance of accomplishing it by doing evil than by doing good. And that's why most great evils are done by movements that want to change the world. If you really want to change the world for the better, work on making better people, not a better world.

We've heard repeatedly that Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz was being treated for depression -- as if that largely explains why he did what he did.

Yet, every one of us knows one or two depressed individuals, and it is inconceivable that they would commit mass murder. As a number of Lincoln biographers have noted, most recently Richard Brookhiser, the great president was probably depressed all his life. And he was a moral giant.

Lubitz murdered 149 people because he was a narcissistic individual who lacked a properly functioning conscience. The number of people walking around in the world with a broken moral compass is quite large. Not all of them are depressed. And I am not only referring to violent Islamists. The U.N. just voted to condemn one country in the world for mistreatment of women: Israel. Are all those U.N. ambassadors depressed?

The pilot of the Germanwings plane could not get back into the cockpit because after 9/11, cockpit doors were made impregnable. That is how it should be. If anyone could get into a locked cockpit, terrorists would also be able to do so. For that reason, it can be said that the 149 passengers and crew were additional victims of 9/11.

We take it for granted that Germanwings, the German government and the German people will fully acknowledge any findings, no matter how damning of one its pilots.

To this day, neither the Egyptian national airline, nor the Egyptian government, nor the Egyptian people acknowledge that it was the Egyptian first officer, Gameel Al-Batouti, who deliberately sent EgyptAir flight 990 into the ocean south of Massachusetts en route to Cairo on Oct. 31, 1999.

In many societies, the Arab world most particularly, saving face matters far more than truth. And where that is the case, social and moral progress is impossible.

It would be a sign of major progress in Egyptian life if, watching the German airline and German society acknowledge that a German deliberately crashed his plane into the Alps, Egyptians rethought their position on Al-Batouti and EgyptAir 990.

This one man murdered 149 people. An ancient Hebrew saying is worth repeating here: He who destroys one life is considered to have destroyed the whole world. This is not mere hyperbole. Every one of us is an entire world. Read the stories of those on board Germanwings flight 9525, and this insight becomes all too clear.

Lubitz not only killed all of these people. He thrust them into a state of terror the likes of which few humans ever experience. People with terminal illnesses know that they will soon die. But they have time to prepare for it. And, over that time, and given the illness, they eventually expect to die. There is, of course, great sadness, but there is no terror -- certainly none in any way comparable to the terror on board the Germanwings flight. For at least five minutes, these people knew they were about to die. Out of nowhere. They had just boarded an airplane -- one of modern society's most routine and safest activities. And suddenly they were about to die. Add to that the terrified screaming of everyone else, and you realize what an almost unique hell these people -- many traveling with a child or a spouse -- went through.

Then there are the people who were not on this flight who loved the people who were. These people -- parents, grandparents, siblings, children and, never forget, friends -- will suffer this loss in varying degrees until they die.

And then there are the pilots of the world. I flew the day after the crash. Though I fly, on average, every week, on that day, I looked at the pilots at the airport a bit differently. It was not an intellectual reaction. But I have no doubt just about every passenger did the same.

Finally, there are Lubitz's parents -- arguably the most harmed people of all. Losing a child is the ultimate parental nightmare. But there is something much worse: when your child is a murderer. And even worse than that: a mass murderer.

As a parent, I can only imagine the pain of parents who lose a child. But nowhere in my imagination is there a place for a child who is a mass murderer.

Dutch pilot predicted French Alps crash

The Dutch pilot made the eerie prediction weeks before the Germanwings crash, saying: "I seriously sometimes wonder who's sitting next to me"

By Henry Samuel, Paris5:47PM BST 31 Mar 2015

A Dutch pilot issued a chilling warning of the risks of being locked out of the cockpit weeks before the Germanwings crash, saying: “I seriously wonder who’s sitting next to me”, it has emerged. “I hope I never find myself in the situation where I go to the toilet and return to find a cockpit door that won’t open," he wrote. Jan Cocheret, a Boeing 777 pilot, wrote these words in a specialist flight magazine less than two months before 27-year old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked his captain out of the cockpit and plunged an Airbus 320 into the French Alps, killing all 150 on board. In a column in Piloot en Vliegtuig (Pilot and Plane), the Dutchman warned that the security measures designed to prevent hijackers taking control of an aircraft in place since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 could also be used against a plane’s captain.

His fears about the risks of a co-pilot taking over a commercial fight proved entirely accurate in the wake of the Germanwings crash in the Alpes of Provence a week ago. Prosecutors said they believe Lubitz, who it now transpires had previously shown suicidal tendencies, took advantage of a toilet break by his captain to lock himself into the cockpit alone and steer the plane into the mountainside.

Black box recordings reveal that he badgered the German captain to relieve himself after his superior complained that he had not had time to go to the lavatory before takeoff in Barcelona for Dusseldorf. Faced with a bulletproof, heavily reinforced door, the captain could be heard on the on-board voice recorder desperately trying to break it down with an instrument thought to be an axe and screaming: “Open the damn door!”.

Lubitz had disabled a system allowing the captain to open the door by tapping a security code. Screams erupted and the plane then hit the mountain. Mr Cocheret wrote that the current system had made him paranoid.. “I seriously sometimes wonder who’s sitting next to me in the cockpit. How can I be sure that I can trust him? Perhaps something terrible has just happened in his life and he’s unable to overcome it. “ He added: “There indeed does exist a way to get back into the cockpit, but if the person inside disables this option (the security code to get in), one could do nothing but sit with the passengers and wait and see what happens.” Following the tragic crash, Mr Cocheret wrote a post on his Facebook page saying: “Unfortunately, this terrible scenario has become reality.”

Mr Cocheret said he had only initially published the column in a specialist magazine as it was “a very sensitive subject that I did not consider suitable” for the general public. In his premonitory piece, called "Will you just open the door?", Mr Cocheret said there have been several cases of pilots shutting out colleagues – either to stop them causing harm or to bring down the plane. The most recent was in November 2013, when captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes, the captain of flight TM470 from the Mozambican capital Maputo to Luanda in Angola, “deliberately” brought down an Embraer 190, killing all 33 on board. “He waited for his colleague to leave the cockpit, and once that happened, he sent the plane into a nosedive towards the Namibian desert. The last sound heard on the cockpit voice recorder was a desperate banging on the locked cockpit door,” he wrote.

He suggested that the Air Malaysia flight that disappeared last April from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board may have suffered the same fate. “A year later, still no one knows what happened to the missing Malaysian Boeing 777. "One of the scenarios which is still being investigated is a deliberate takeover by one of the pilots when his colleague briefly left the cockpit,” he wrote. “I sometimes seriously wonder who is sitting next to me in the cockpit, whether the plane belongs to a large or a small company or is a business or sports aircraft. Whether you know the person or have long enjoyed being with him in the cockpit, who can guarantee that you can trust him?” The Dutch pilot's warning emerged as France's air accident authority, BEA, said its investigation into the Germanwings crash would study "systemic weaknesses" that might have led to the disaster, such as psychological profiling and cockpit door locks.

"The safety investigation will be oriented towards the cockpit door locking system logic and cockpit access and exit procedures, as well as the criteria and procedures applied to detect specific psychological profiles," BEA said in a statement. BEA conducts civil crash investigations on identifying safety measures that would prevent future accidents, but does not seek to attribute blame.

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