Not nearly enough people are talking about or even aware of how bad it would be to put the lives of hundreds of passengers in the hands of a single person alone in a cockpit behind a heavily fortified locked door.
Okay, look. No. NO. We’re not doing this. I’ll tell you why we’re not doing this.
1. Silk Air 185
2. Germanwings Flight 9525
3. LAM Mozambique Airline Flight 470
In each of these flights, one of the two pilots waited until the other one left for a restroom break or whatever and locked the door behind them. They then either set the autopilot to steer the plane into terrain or put it into a dive deliberately. Two of the three happened after 9/11, when airlines made a concerted effort to make it more difficult to get into the cockpit. Therefore, the other pilots on Flights 9525 and 470 could not get through the door to stop the inevitable.
Those are the ones that we know for sure happened that way. Malaysia Airline 370 could have gone down due to that, but we don’t know for obvious reasons. You can’t do this sort of thing on a commercial flight with only one person behind a door no one can’t get through.
I mean, Jesus, fucking “Airplane!” gives you a good reason for why you can’t just have one person in the cockpit. That person gets sick and a hundred passengers are screwed.
You can’t keep making everybody take off their goddamn shoes even though nobody’s made a shoe bomb for two decades and then just shrug off that having only one person in a securely locked cockpit is a problem. A big one. The plane’s computer could take off, fly, and land all by itself and there should *still* be more than one person in that cockpit, both to make sure nothing goes wrong with the plane and as a redundancy from one pilot becoming physically or mentally incapacitated. One pilot goes to the restroom, and at the very least *someone* should be in there with the other pilot.
This is making me think of FedEx Flight 705. A flight engineer with the airline decided to take his own life by taking over a flight using bludgeoning weapons to simulate the blunt force trauma from a crash. So he boards a cargo flight with a three-man crew as a deadhead passenger. It’s just the four of them. He was supposed to be a member of that crew, but wasn’t allowed and needed to change his plans. But if he had been, it would have been him against two other men, alone in the cockpit, and as the flight engineer he would have turned off the CVR and crashed the plane, hopefully leaving no evidence of his crime.
He still boarded the flight before the crew even got there, and turned off the CVR. The flight engineer, Andy Peterson, noticed and turned it back on, assuming it was a mistake. But once he, captain Dave Sanders, and First Officer Jim Tucker were in the air, their passenger removed a hammer from a guitar case he brought with him and proceeded to attack the crew. They all fought back. It was three against one, even if that one was determined and armed, not just with a hammer but with a speargun and other blunt instruments. The crew sustained very serious injuries, and yet Jim Tucker - who previously flew during the Vietnam War - took control of the plane and proceeded to fly the DC-10 like something out of “Top Gun,” fast and twisting and tossing their attacker off his feet. He flew that plane faster than it was meant to go. DC-10s are not supposed to move the way he made that plane move in order to save his crewmates. And then somehow, as Sanders and Peterson restrained the attacker, Sanders safely landed the plane.
If there had been only one man in that cockpit, the attacker would have been able to carry out his plan.
Only one pilot in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft is NOT SAFE. For many, many, MANY reasons.
“But we’re having staffing problems!”
Huh, weird. It’s almost as if you’ve put airline pilots under enormous stress, not accommodated for the fact an older generation of pilots are close to retirement, and depended for decades on pilots with flight experience gained in the military they’re not getting anymore thanks to drones. That’s all on you, assholes.
@trollprincess bringing the research I was too tired to initially do.
And that’s just not even counting everytime a pilot got distracted or just flat out made an input error. Crew Resource Management helps with most of that now but it only works when there’s a crew (Eastern Air 401, United Airlines 173 for some pre-CRM examples of the first, American Airlines 965 for an example of the second; CRM failed there, but it’s impossible to get good listings where it worked to prevent the issue because people don’t note the successes)
And then, as the article mentions, those times where something in the system goes wrong, or control surfaces get damaged, or an engine fails where you’re going to want a second person helping out. (United 811, British Airways 5390, China Airlines 006, US Airways 1549 which the article mentions, TACA 110).
This change would DESTROY Aviation Safety
The article at the top of this post mentions American Eagle (Envoy) Flight 3556 – the pilot had a medical emergency shortly after take-off and the co-pilot was able to declare an emergency, turn the plane back, and land safely at the original airport. The pilot later died of that medical emergency, even though they were taken to a hospital after the landing.
Think what would have happened if the pilot was alone in the cockpit. Even without ill intent on anyone’s part, emergency situations happen and you need a second pilot in the cockpit.
so i was compelled to look that up and
A) the most venomous lizard in north america is called the Gila Monster
B) I’m no expert obviously but that boy there sure looks like a Gila Monster
C) from the Gila Monster wikipedia article, here is the funniest doctor that ever lived:
"I have never been called to attend a case of Gila monster bite, and I don't want to be. I think a man who is fool enough to get bitten by a Gila monster ought to die. The creature is so sluggish and slow of movement that the victim of its bite is compelled to help largely in order to get bitten."
–Dr. Ward, Arizona Graphic, September 23, 1899
Im obsessed with this piece where The Washington Post tries to interview dril with a straight face
Everyone who has to work retail today should be allowed to assault one customer for free
it’s always so fucking funny to me when terfs are like “how can you say trans women and women are the same thing! being born as a man makes you different!” because like. yes. trans women and cis women are different. so are black women and white women. and straight women and queer woman. and women from different countries and different socioeconomic statuses. there’s diversity in the experience of womanhood? what a wild concept
incidentally, this why terfs tend to be white women. from the combahee river collective statement, 1977:
…we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.
(emphasis mine)
“To argue that transsexual women should not enter [women-exclusive spaces] because their experiences are different would have to assume that all other women’s experiences are the same, and this is a racist assumption. The argument that transsexual women have experienced some degree of male privilege should not bar them from our communities once we realize that not all women are equally privileged or oppressed.”
This. This is the core of it. This is why trans-exclusionary radical feminism is rooted in racism, colonialism, and imperialism. It excludes the idea that there can be any other type of “woman” except one very (white, colonialist, imperialist) definition.
What IS it with tumblr users and “biting” I bet you people have never even bitten someone irl
