A man closes his eyes during the special Mass to honour the victims of the Germanwings jet crash, inside the cathedral Notre Dame de Bourg, in Digne-les-Bains, France. Photo / AP
A man closes his eyes during the special Mass to honour the victims of the Germanwings jet crash, inside the cathedral Notre Dame de Bourg, in Digne-les-Bains, France. Photo / AP
Dutch 777 captain Jan Cocheret foreshadowed danger in article just weeks before Germanwings tragedy.
A Dutch pilot issued a chilling warning of the risks of being locked out of the cockpit weeks before the Germanwings crash.
"I hope I never find myself in the situation where I go to the toilet and return to find a cockpit door that won't open," he wrote.
Jan Cocheret, a Boeing 777 pilot, wrote these words in a specialist flight magazine less than two months before 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz is believed to have locked his captain out of the cockpit and plunged an Airbus 320 into the French Alps, killing all 150 on board.
In a column in Piloot en Vliegtuig (Pilot and Plane), the Dutchman warned that the security measures designed to prevent hijackers taking control of an aircraft in place since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, could also be used against a plane's captain.
His fears about the risks of a co-pilot taking over a commercial fight proved entirely accurate in the wake of the Germanwings crash.
Prosecutors said they believed Lubitz, who it now transpires had previously shown suicidal tendencies, took advantage of a toilet break by his captain to lock himself into the cockpit alone and steer the plane into the mountainside.
Black box recordings reveal he badgered the German captain to relieve himself after his superior complained that he had not had time to go to the toilet before takeoff in Barcelona for Dusseldorf.
Faced with a bulletproof, heavily reinforced door, the captain could be heard on the on-board voice recorder desperately trying to break in with an instrument thought to be an axe. Lubitz had disabled a system allowing the captain to open the door by tapping a security code. Screams erupted and the plane then hit the mountain.
Cocheret wrote that the current system had made him paranoid.
"I seriously sometimes wonder who's sitting next to me in the cockpit. How can I be sure that I can trust him? Perhaps something terrible has just happened in his life and he's unable to overcome it."
He added: "There indeed does exist a way to get back into the cockpit, but if the person inside disables this option (the security code to get in), one could do nothing but sit with the passengers and wait and see what happens."
After the tragic crash, Cocheret wrote a post on his Facebook page saying: "Unfortunately, this terrible scenario has become reality."
Cocheret said he had initially published the column in a specialist magazine only as it was "a very sensitive subject that I did not consider suitable" for the general public.
In his premonitory piece, called "Will you just open the door?", Cocheret said there had been several cases of pilots shutting out colleagues - either to stop them causing harm or to bring down the plane.
The most recent was in November 2013, when captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes, the captain of flight TM470 from the Mozambican capital, Maputo, to Luanda in Angola, "deliberately" brought down an Embraer 190, killing all 33 on board.
"He waited for his colleague to leave the cockpit, and once that happened, he sent the plane into a nosedive towards the Namibian desert. The last sound heard on the cockpit voice recorder was a desperate banging on the locked cockpit door," he wrote.
He suggested the Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared a year ago flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board might have suffered the same fate.
"A year later, still no one knows what happened to the missing Malaysian Boeing 777. One of the scenarios which is still being investigated is a deliberate takeover by one of the pilots when his colleague briefly left the cockpit.
"Whether you know the person or have long enjoyed being with him in the cockpit, who can guarantee that you can trust him?"
Call to screen for psychological flaws
French air accident investigators will recommend changes to psychological examinations for all airline pilots.
The official investigation report will suggest ways to screen pilots for potentially calamitous character flaws. It will also recommend changes in security procedures to make it impossible for pilots to lock their colleagues out of the cockpit.
France's air accident investigation bureau, the BEA, said yesterday that its report would cover "criteria and procedures to identify specific psychological profiles" among pilots.
Passengers look at candles and flowers for the victims of the plane crash at the airport in Dusseldorf, Germany. Photo / AP
It will also look at "the logic of locking systems for cockpit doors and procedures for entering and leaving the cockpit".
The BEA said it had expanded its investigation to include "systematic weaknesses" in airline procedures. Not only would it produce an account of the Germanwings crash, it would look at ways of trying to prevent such a disaster happening again.
The European air safety agency has already recommended that all airlines, as a temporary measure, ensure no pilot is left in a cockpit alone.
Lawyers representing some of the victims' families also called yesterday for new rules on psychiatric tests for pilots.
"An incident of this nature calls into question whether airlines should implement additional testing by a psychiatric specialist, and whether this should be made compulsory by aviation authorities," said Jim Morris, a partner at the Irwin Mitchell law firm in London.
