One of many what-if questions that students of the tragedy ask is: Could the KLM 747 have cleared the taxiing Pan Am plane if the KLM's pilot hadn't insisted on refueling his aircraft before leaving Tenerife, thereby greatly increasing its weight? explanation. In the background, the CVR picked up a muffled shout: For the love of God, open this door!. Captain.. First Officer Andreas Lubitz hid his psychotic depression from his employer until he snapped, but instead of enacting broader exceptions to medical confidentiality, the real solution might be something completely different: to loosen, rather than tighten, the rules surrounding mental fitness to fly. Mitigations can be put in place to compensate, such as requirements for pilots with certain conditions to fly as part of a multi-person crew. If you admit to snoring, prepare to spend thousands on tests to prove you dont have sleep apnea. Covering the journey to net zero emissions in aviation. We owe it to Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, who died a hero, even if he could not possibly have saved the plane. But for those who deal with medical certification in their day-to-day lives that is to say, pilots this proposal is alarming not just because of the principle of reduced privacy, but because from the inside, its potentially damaging safety effects are self-evident. A CCTV camera on a nearby building captured the final seconds of Atlas Air flight 3591. Germanwings flight 9525 should have been unremarkable. Minutes later, at 10:48, the scrambled fighter jet took off and hurried to the area where flight 9525 was last seen, already fearing that the plane had crashed in the mountains. The door was too strong, but still he fought and still Lubitz sat there, his breath calm, ignoring the frantic screaming and banging, disregarding the ground proximity warning system as it blared, TERRAIN! Put the plane into a nose dive. The other side of the argument is that Lubitz should never have been allowed to fly at all, in which case hope wouldnt have mattered. Sean Archuleta, who was riding in the jump seat, died in the With help from his psychiatrist, Lubitz was eventually able to end treatment, and in July 2009 he was declared fully recovered. Am employees who boarded in Tenerife and were sitting in the cockpit The trouble seemed to occur within the last 30 seconds of the transcript. conversation in tower]. PULL UP! And did he watch as the mountainside drew nearer and nearer? RT speak simultaneously. [APP transmission is readable but slightly broken]. In this case the word incapacitation could mean anything from inability to focus to loss of consciousness to suicidal acts. Doctors proposed that he might be suffering from a psychosomatic disorder, in which psychological factors give rise to seemingly physical symptoms, but Lubitz was allegedly resistant to the idea, possibly because the doctors wanted him to take psychoactive medications that he feared would invalidate his medical certificate. above). Lord, have mercy! After all, his flight training had cost him 60,000 euros and he was still repaying the loan.