Der folgende Artikel wurde von Capt. J. Mahon für Time geschrieben (fragt nicht nicht, welche Time, ist ja auch egal). Einen Link finde ich nicht, aber er ist mit der Veröffentlichung in Fora einverstanden. Food for thought....
I have spent 14,680 hours of my life sitting in a small room at the front of an aircraft with a colleague who is often a total stranger to me.
Imagine that we are half way across the north Atlantic heading for Florida with 300 passengers on board. We have been unable to get to our desired altitude because of other traffic. The forecast winds are not quite as helpful as forecast, and the weather at destination is looking like it might deteriorate. I glance across at my colleague and think “If something happens to me, right now, is he made of the right stuff to get us all safely back to earth?”
The tragedy of the A320 air crash in the Alps has highlighted problems around cockpit security but the greatest problem of all is pilots’ mental health.
I have trained dozens of pilots during my 33-year career in commercial air travel and have been struck by the scant attention paid to this issue by airlines and regulators and the patchwork of testing standards used across Europe and the rest of the world.
The growth in low cost airlines, as well as increase in those from the Middle and Far East, has intensified demand for new pilots. The courses they go on will differ but most begin with a basic psychometric test of the kind countless companies now use. If successful, they will then go through a flying school for the basic stuff, simulator training for the type of aircraft they will fly, tests on their flying skills and a medical exam.
Andreas Lubitz would have gone through all of this in preparation for his career. We know that he took time out from his training to be treated for mental illness but should he not have had many more follow-up tests once he passed his exams and started flying?
During the course of a year, most pilots will typically do two cockpit simulator checks and number of ground school classes on human factors, safety equipment, technical knowledge of the aircraft. Seldom will mental health be discussed. And yet too many people have lost their lives due to mental health problems in the aviation industry.
I know this from first hand experience. Once, when training experienced pilots to become mentors to groups of junior pilots, I ran a role-playing exercise. The prospective mentor had to work with a colleague, played by an actor, who had started well but had become confrontational, been late for a number of flights, occasionally untidy and needed guidance. During their “interview”, the colleague became obstructive and sullen to the point where the prospective mentor became angry. Just at that moment, the colleague put his head in his hands and sobbed: “She’s dying and I don’t know what to do”. You could have heard a pin drop. No one had recognised the signs. And I don’t claim to be superior in this respect than any of my fellow pilots. Many years later, I failed to spot the signs in a colleague who went from being a happy, professional pilot to an angry, depressed individual who took his own life.
Being a pilot is still regarded as a glamorous career but much has changed since the glory days of the 1960s and 1970s and its effect on pilots’ state of mind is insufficiently understood.
Commercial jets once had a standard cockpit crew of five: a captain, a first officer, a flight engineer, a navigator and a radio officer. Today, we have two. The advent of computer technology has made the other positions redundant. No bad thing – the aviation industry would be nowhere without technology.
The moving map displays, more accurate navigation systems and fault recognition technology were a huge leap forward in safety. The thing that didn’t change so quickly was us. Our brains required us to adapt to the fact that so much of a flight is now flown by computer. We need to focus and train much more on how to react when it goes wrong. But instead, I fear, we’ve simply come to rely on new technology and found ourselves surprised when it does something we didn’t think it would do. The comment of “what’s it doing now?” can still, disturbingly, sometimes be heard in cockpits.
The proportion of an airliner’s flight controlled by computer, not pilot, is growing. This creates its own potential hazard. Many pilots fill the time by reading books or newspapers but for others, boredom and restlessness set in. It may seem a luxury to many, but the paradox of boredom while carrying the onerous responsibility for hundreds of passengers’ safety is a recent phenomenon and its effect on pilots’ state of mind needs studying.
None of this is to excuse what was a selfish act of mass murder committed by Andreas Lubitz over the Alps on Tuesday. But until the airline industry and its regulators take more seriously the mental health of pilots around the world, the danger is something similar could happen again.
