IT HAS been less than a week since the catastrophic loss of Germanwings Flight 9525 and its precious cargo of 144 passengers and six crew. In that short time investigators have pointed the finger of blame squarely at Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year-old first officer who appears to have locked his captain out of the flight deck and deliberately crashed the plane into the French Alps. Though incomprehensible, his gruesome deed is not without precedentfor commercial pilots. Fear of falling victim to such asymmetric evil will, inevitably, plague the minds of the 9m passengers who take to the skies each day. It will take time to soothe their concerns. But one Germanwings pilot has already started the healing process, unburdening his heart with emotional, pre-flight speeches to passengers. Britta Englisch, who flew with the airline the day after the crash, posted her experience on Facebook (translated from German):
Yesterday morning at 8:40am, I got onto a Germanwings flight from Hamburg to Cologne with mixed feelings. But then the captain not only welcomed each passenger separately, he also made a short speech before take-off. Not from the cockpit, he was standing in the cabin.
He spoke about how the accident touched him and the whole crew. About how queasy the crew feels, but that everybody from the crew is voluntarily here. And about his family, and that the crew have a family, and that he is going to do everything to be with his family again tonight. It was completely silent. And then everybody applauded. I want to thank this pilot. He understood what everybody was thinking. And he managed to give me, at least, a good feeling for this flight.
The pilot, Frank Woiton, also volunteered to operate the Barcelona to Düsseldorf route the day after it ended in disaster. Speaking to Germany’s Bild newspaper about that flight, he recounted hugging passengers as they boarded the hushed jet, assuring them he intends to sit with his family for dinner that evening, safe and sound. “People should see that in the cockpit there is also another human being,” Mr Woiton, who has previously flown with Mr Lubitz, told the newspaper. This is gut-wrenching stuff. That any commercial pilot should feel obliged to reassure his passengers that he is not homicidally depressed is a wretched state of affairs. Yet such overt humanisation is exactly what is needed in the aftermath of a human-instigated tragedy.
Management at Germanwings and its parent company Lufthansa have echoed the approach deftly. When other crew members refused to work the day after the crash, Thomas Winkelmann, Germanwings’ boss, did not try to discredit their unease. Instead, he publicly defended their decision, speaking of a close-knit “Germanwings family” that has been overcome by “mourning and shock”. Lufthansa’s crisis management centre issued regular, reliable updates through multiple channels, while swiftly extending psychological support and financial relief to the relatives of the dead. There is not much more an airline can do following a catastrophic event; it can, however, do much less, as illustrated by Malaysia Airlines’ confused, contradictory and altogether insensitive handling of the Flight 370 disappearance. (To that airline’s credit, its subsequent handling of the shooting down of Flight 17 suggested that lessons had been learned.)
One of the cruellest aspects of this tragedy is the impossibility of preventing recurrences. Technical faults, once diagnosed, can be fixed. Operational shortcomings can be ironed out, if never perfected. But when a person in a position of trust decides to betray that privilege, no amount of forethought or red tape can negate the threat they pose. If it could, then the “position of trust” would have been nominal only. The hasty decision by EASA, Europe’s aviation regulator, to require that at least two crew members remain in the cockpit at all times should now reduce the risk of pilot murder-suicide. But it is no silver bullet. When the first officer of EgyptAir Flight 990 decided to crash his plane into the Atlantic Ocean in October 1999, killing 217, his captain fought valiantly to save those aboard, ultimately failing to over-power the co-pilot.
Efforts by the industry to tighten psychological evaluations, though valid, will be equally imperfect. Only the most intrusive of tests have any chance of diagnosing mental illness, and they can in turn drive a wedge between employee and company. Pilots who fear losing their jobs over mild depression will go out of their way to hide it from the airline, perhaps allowing the problem to snowball into something more severe.
 Several days after the 9/11 attacks on America, your correspondent anxiously boarded a flight from New York to London, shuffling down an air bridge lined with heavily-armed, eagle-eyed police. At the time, the airline industry was evincing a message of defiance and ultra-reinforced security. In the aftermath of Flight 9525, a more nuanced, personal message is called for. Mr Woiton has encapsulated it perfectly.