Two People in a Cockpit Isn't Enough: What We Need to Prevent Future Air Disasters

The new rules being put into place after the Germanwings disaster are smart. But they're not enough to prevent all kinds of similar air disasters

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A week after the Germanwings crash, many airlines around Europe and elsewhere in the world have swiftly adopted a new rule: There must be two people in the cockpit at any time. This means that if the pilot takes a bathroom break—as he did during the Germanwings flight—then a flight attendant or other crew member must enter the cockpit to prevent the other pilot from being in there alone.

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It's a sensible rule meant to prevent a rogue pilot from ever again seizing the controls of a jetliner, and one the FAA already has on the books here in the U.S. But like many of the safety and security fixes adopted after 9/11, it's not a slam-dunk: Having two people in the cockpit doesn't completely prevent disaster. For example, the Germanwings crash has revived memories of other cases where a plane was deliberately put into a fatal dive even with two or more authorized people in the cockpit, including the 1999 crash of Egyptair flight 990, considered to be a suicide-murder, or the crash of a Japan Airlines flight in 1982, where two crewmembers were unable to stop a third pilot from crash-landing the DC-8.

This technology is in fact available. Our commercial planes just don't have it yet

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To fully protect planes from a pilot who's incapacitated or intentionally trying to crash, we need technology that could automatically take over the flying of a plane from a pilot who's been compromised, as a backstop in case all other preventive measures fail.

This technology is in fact available, and has been considered in the past. Our commercial planes just don't have it yet.

"The technology has really been perfected," says former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia. "It's basically the same as what we use in drones." The idea seems reasonable enough: If a "pilot" can sit in a command center somewhere in the U.S. and "fly" drones halfway across the globe, then why not build an emergency ground control system for commercial airliners that could take over the aircraft from terrorists or rogue pilots? A remote pilot could then safely land the jet at the closest airfield.

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Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr (R) and Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann speaks to the press after laying a wreath near a stele in memory of the victims of the Germanwings Airbus A320 crash.
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"[This] would need the support of the industry, which isn't there yet," Goglia says. He predicts, however, with the advent of new aircraft designs and a modernized, satellite-based air traffic control system, such remote control setups could become reality in 20 years.

In fact, Airbus, in partnership with avionics supplier Honeywell, activetly considered the feature for new aircraft such as the Airbus A380, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. But they didn't because they wanted to avoid further delaying the production of that massive jetliner, and also because of the risks of operating remotely controlled aircraft in congested airspace.

"Very, very rare event"

Of course, technology that could remotely control planes has its own huge potential flaws, starting with the difficulty in making any ground system tamper-proof. "If you are looking for a silver bullet, there really is none," said Capt. Mark Weiss, who flew for decades as a commercial airline pilot for a major U.S. airline.

Weiss said he worked on an industry panel looking into the remote control option a number of years ago. Ultimately, "we couldn't get to where we could see the benefits outweighing the drawbacks."

"If you are looking for a silver bullet, there really is none."

John Cox, another former pilot who heads Safety Operating Systems, an aviation safety consultancy, said the industry should think twice before it rushes into costly decisions to equip aircraft with new technology.

For example, he—along with most pilots' organizations—is opposed to another idea that's being bandied about: installing video cameras that could stream footage live from the cockpit. Proponents argue that cameras would provide valuable evidence in an accident, but Cox disagrees, saying they'd add little to the more detailed data contained in the black box recorders, and that the potential for misinterpreting or misusing the footage is high.

"It would be a huge mistake to do something quickly because of this very, very rare event," he argues.

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