An Embraer ERJ-190LR (ERJ-190-100 LR) plane, registered P4-KCJ, sustained substantial damage in an accident at NE of Lisbon, Portugal. The report issued Wednesday does not include a cause for the crash, which NTSB officials said is still under investigation. Instead, he increased the selected airspeed again, to 323 knots. In the end, a French judge determined that under existing laws, the answer was no: after all, he did not divulge anything about his deteriorating mental state to his coworkers, family, or friends, and especially not to his employer. KLM 3Willem Schreuder, KLM Flight Engineer An airplane is seen in this image moments before it crashed into Trinity Bay near Anahuac, Texas, on Feb. 23, 2019. Lord, have mercy! He took several sick days, but for the most part he ignored his doctors requests to stop working. and his copilot NTSB Media Relations
In fact, a study by the University of North Dakota found that 56% of all pilots in the United States have knowingly failed to disclose portions of their medical history at some point in their careers. Pilots describe fatal descent of Amazon cargo jet | khou.com But what if it didnt have to be that way? To understand why, we should go back to the beginning of Lubitzs training, when he first suffered from depression. After reaching 38,000 feet, the autopilot leveled the plane, and Sondenheimer proposed that Lubitz prepare for the descent briefing, seeing as their cruise phase would be short. With about 6,000 flying hours over a 10-year career, Sondenheimer was moderately experienced, while Lubitz was still fairly new he had been flying for Germanwings since 2014 and had so far accumulated just 630 hours in the air. HD (Full) Atlas Air 3591 Crash ATC (with Subtitles) - YouTube He had multiple failures and didnt disclose a few of Okay, The investigator can then visualize the airplane's attitude, instrument readings, power settings and other characteristics of the flight. Allegedly, he failed to disclose his history of depression on the form, but was somehow caught in the lie; the official report, however, makes no mention of any explicit rulebreaking. When the switch is selected to lock, all use of the keypad is disabled for five minutes. If he had simply been denied on account of that history, the argument goes, the crash would never have happened. Furthermore, they argued, the policy leaves the cockpit door open for longer periods of time, increasing the risk of hijackings, which historically have been much more common than pilot suicides anyway. Okay, you confirm that you want the Clipper 1736 to turn left at the third landed here KLM We off the runway again for the beginning of Runway 30. Atlas Air pilots Capt. Two more calls followed, coming through loud and clear, but Lubitz ignored those, too. In addition, some FDRs can record the status of more than 1,000 other in-flight characteristics that can aid in the investigation. yells "Get off! modified for clarity and ease of reading. After all, he had done exactly that during training in 2008. flight engineer, even as the KLM plane has begun rolling down the runway, to In the depths of despair, he experienced suicidal ideation, made a pact with his therapist not to commit suicide, and was briefly hospitalized. But there was no reply. Maybe determined that the Pan Am flight crew saw the KLM coming at them out of the You can be denied a medical because your therapists had to submit a diagnosis, even if untrue, in order for insurance to cover basic therapy. Increasing awareness is the only way to pressure governments to reform the system and make no mistake, the consequences of failing to fix the problem are potentially disastrous. look at him! 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. Okay, it's too late. Mountains rose up beneath them, and passengers began to panic. According to these sources, the conversations between the pilots were normal at first, and confined to operational matters. On the flight into Barcelona from Dsseldorf on the morning of the crash, it almost came. Publicly available data clearly traced the flights long, steady descent, proving that the plane was under control and appeared to be operating normally at all times. His physician diagnosed him with possible psychosis, a condition characterized by delusions and difficulty determining what is real, prompting a referral to a psychiatric hospital, along with 19 days of sick leave. Technical experts in the CVR group will convene in the coming week for a time-consuming review of the entire recording in order to produce a transcript of the In fact, they might have believed that Lubitz was complying with their requests that he take time off from work, but even if they knew he was flying, their options would have been limited. 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. In February, a physician issued him 8 days of sick leave, but he kept working anyway. Transcript from crash of Atlas Air jet carrying Amazon, USPS cargo Rappelling down to the scene, they were confronted with human carnage as well. I read that on require backtrack on 12 for takeoff Runway 30. intercepting the 325 radial from Las Palmas VOR. don't think they have takeoff minimums anywhere right now. Perhaps he performatively imitated empathy in times of normalcy, but in a moment of great stress, the lives of others simply did not occur to him. Many of my articles end with a reassuring roundup of safety reforms or planned improvements, but unfortunately, this is not one of them. Minutes later, he was cleared down to 21,000 feet, and again he selected an altitude of 100 feet. Expressing his companys horror and revulsion, Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr told the press, If a person takes 149 other people to their deaths with him, there is another word than suicide.. The only people who knew about the depths of Lubitzs illness were the physicians and psychiatrists with whom he spoke in the months before the tragedy. Many pilots reading this are probably already aware that Lubitzs failure to disclose would not necessarily have seemed important, because the dark truth about the aeromedical process is that everyone lies. The pilot can then glance at a live video feed of the entry area in order to determine whether the person should be permitted to enter. piecing together the events. Kyra Dempsey, analyzer of plane crashes. Negative, The transcript is part of a 3,000-page report released Wednesday by the NTSB. terms and conditions But Im about to propose a radical hypothesis: that his heinous crime might have been avoided if the aeromedical process had treated him like a normal person. The firstborn son of a banker and a piano teacher, Andreas Gnter Lubitz was born on December 18th, 1987 in the Bavarian town of Neuberg an der Donau, although his family moved across the country to Montabaur while he was still in school. He also expressed a desire to fly from an early age, and the passion never left him. The CVR captured the sound of his seat sliding back, the sound of the cockpit door opening, and finally a click as it swung closed again, locking automatically. Yeah, Would Perhaps he was simply a murderous psychopath all along, desiring to live in infamy. The NTSB released over 2,000 pages of documents from its investigation into the February 23 crash of Atlas Air Flight 3591, bound from Miami to Houston, which Some back-and-forth occurs initially about what Air Traffic Control the actions of both the flight crews of the two aircraft involved and Los But this time, that didnt happen. Propelled by their screams of terror, Sondenheimer beat, pried, and hammered as hard as he could, but still the reinforced door refused to give way. As a result of these factors, Lubitz probably felt compelled to hide his condition at any cost. The CVR recordings are treated differently than the other factual information obtained in an accident investigation. We owe it to those who died on flight 9525, trapped aboard an airliner as their own pilot drove it unceasingly downward, possessed by demons known only to him. Other explanations were no doubt considered, but none fit the evidence. At the time, the accident flight was about 40 miles from IAH and descending through about 6,300 ft msl toward the target altitude of 3,000 ft msl. In the background, the CVR picked up a muffled shout: For the love of God, open this door!. A new way to document and demonstrate airworthiness compliance and aircraft value. KLM RTKLM aircraft radio transmission You can be forced to spend thousands to prove you arent suicidal because you take medication for general anxiety. 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! AeroInside has currently 34 articles available for reading 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.