Because it feels like being punished for the actions of other people to have my finite time in this universe forced into therapy if I'm a pilot who doesn't need it. Three incidents in the past four decades against 110,000 pilots working daily and not crashing planes because they've had a mental breakdown should not justify the pilot having to give up a whole day a year to talk about their feelings.
This is a real challenge for the FAA; they do not like having a variable they can't control, but they also know they don't have a good enough model of mental health to control it yet. I don't envy them the challenge, or they pushback they'll get trying to use their traditional intervention strategies to fix the issue.
A perhaps less conventional intervention could be using starlink or similar to permit remote takeover of flights that appear to be going rogue. Potentially also addresses some hijacking scenarios (though maybe introduces others).
Locking out a conscious crew in the cockpit? Never going to happen, for reasons others have already listed.
The only thing where I could see a remote landing system make sense is during the (very few) cases of crew incapacitation (e.g. Helios 522), but it would almost certainly be done in a way that makes it very apparent and easy to override for the crew actually on board, just like the cockpit door lock operates currently: Require authentication (a PIN code) for unlocking from the cabin-side; give the cockpit crew complete authority to override even that.
That very system has unfortunately contributed to at least one tragedy (Germanwings 9525), but I think the general risk assessment of "bad guy in the cockpit" being significantly less likely than "bad guy trying to compromise the good guys in the cockpit" still makes sense.
I 100% trust my life better to two human pilots than to the same flight on an aircraft with a remote control system capable of taking over the aircraft's control against the wishes of those in the cockpit.
A reasonable concern, but I'm surprised at the degree of negative reaction to this— for example, who has the last word on control of a manned spacecraft? Obviously they are controllable from the ground, but can the personnel onboard take that back?
I feel like there's at least scope for an interesting discussion on what a takeover could look like and how the process could be abused and/or protected from abuse.
For example, what if it was something that could be requested using a "call for help" mechanism available elsewhere on the craft? Perhaps there could be buttons on opposite sides of the galley that would activate the distress call, so two flight attendants would have to collude for it— that would call the attention of the ground station to a pilot-incident-in-progress who could then receive telemetry and begin to investigate what was going on and go through some kind of clearance process to unlock the final takeover key that would let them disable the cockpit if deemed necessary.
Trusting a bunch of people seems a lot better than trusting a single person. For instance, in this case, the two sane pilots were able to restrain the third and prevent a disaster.
This is just completely untenable in reality, you're going to have multiple people jump in during an emergency (how do they know? will they be monitoring every flight at all times?) and potentially rip the controls away from PIC because they, by committee, decided on the spot that they could do a better job?
The same satellite internet provider whose owner micromanages access to in times of crisis based on whatever idea is playing in his head? I'd really prefer starlink to not be a control mechanism for anything until the ownership changes hands. Maybe iridium would be a better choice, if we ever hit the point we'll need it (10+ years with single digit number of passenger fatalities tells me we don't)
Fair, but these pilot mental health incidents are not that common. We all rightly resented two decades of taking off our shoes in security because of that one shoe bombing attempt.
The trick would be to position it as being about broader spectrum welfare than just a binary determination of whether you're crazy enough to try to kill a plane full of innocent passengers.
Correct. I’m an aviation geek/disaster post mortem junkie and the only incident I’m aware of is Germanwings (obviously) and potentially MH370 depending on which scenario/theory you subscribe to.
There have been a few other incidents that essentially boil down to CRM (crew resource management) issues regarding pilots with clear and obvious personality issues that when combined with the wrong crew members has resulted in loss of life.
Basically, combine someone on the flight deck with seniority who’s an asshole with a junior and impressionable crew member and it can be a problem:
Either way aviation is remarkably safe generally speaking and I’m not sure I’d put mandatory therapy, etc towards the top of the list in terms of approaches to make flying even safer.
Of course pilots have a tough job and are responsible for hundreds of lives at a time and their needs should be looked after. But the incident rate just isn’t there.
Because it feels like being punished for the actions of other people to have my finite time in this universe forced into therapy if I'm a pilot who doesn't need it. Three incidents in the past four decades against 110,000 pilots working daily and not crashing planes because they've had a mental breakdown should not justify the pilot having to give up a whole day a year to talk about their feelings.
This is a real challenge for the FAA; they do not like having a variable they can't control, but they also know they don't have a good enough model of mental health to control it yet. I don't envy them the challenge, or they pushback they'll get trying to use their traditional intervention strategies to fix the issue.