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Germanwings Plane Crash Was No Accident
hcs_$reboot writes The Germanwings plane crash takes a scary turn. After a couple of days investigation, it appears that the co-pilot requested control of the aircraft about 20 minutes into the flight. The pilot then left the cockpit, leaving the co-pilot in full control of the plane. Then, the co-pilot manually and "intentionally" set the plane on the descent that drove it into the mountainside in the southern French Alps. Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, a 28-year-old German national, could be heard breathing throughout the plane's descent and was alive at the point of impact, according to the prosecutor.
Designing security systems is very hard, and this crash seems to be a classic example of why it is so hard.
The reinforced cockpit door, and the access control system, was introduced after 9/11. Before that the cockpit door was typically a flimsy thing you could break down with a few good kicks. The reinforced door is designed to prevent passengers from obtaining access to the cockpit. The threat model includes attempts at brute force (the door has to withstand roughly an hour of abuse with anything that can be found in the cabin) and tries to coerce the cabin crew for keys or codes (as the pilots control entry). Airbus (and also Boeing, I am pretty sure) also has an emergency procedure which lets you enter the cockpit should the pilots be incapacitated, but the pilots can disable this. There is a nice video here which illustrates hos the access control system airbus uses works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If media is correct one of the pilots wanted to crash the plane, and used the cockpit security system to prevent the other crew from interfering. This was not part of the threat model, and that made the current security system work in favor of the attacker instead of the rest of the crew. Not good. It cost 150 lives.
There are ways to get around this. Some airlines require two people to be present in the cockpit at all times, in an effort to prevent this kind of attack. It makes it a lot harder, but not impossible. It could also be possible to allow people on the ground to override the lock on the cockpit door. But in both cases you need to actually design your security system to deal with the threat, which I am sure people are rushing to do now...
No.
Simply falling on this switch wouldnt cause it to change positions - it requires a deliberate act to do so, the switch requires a certain force to pull up and then move to one position or another, its not like accidentally changing channels on your TV because you sat on the remote.
Also, there is no button or switch he could have fallen on which would have caused the gradual descent that we know the aircraft took. Changing the auto pilot altimeter requires you to use a dial and then confirm the change in two separate actions. Any interaction with the side stick would require the auto pilot to be off, which would mean we should have seen a lot of other, large movements in the aircrafts path, which are completely missing from the telemetry we have at the moment.
The few commands that we see in the telemetry (and by telemetry I mean the transponder tracks, which cover speed, height and directional changes) indicate that the aircraft was under either the control of the pilot or the autopilot for the entire duration of the descent.
there's speculation, there's also logical inference. considering the entire universe of possibilities doesn't mean we turn off our brains
you are correct we should consider all possible situations, no matter how remote, because we're already in far remote territory here with this sequence of events
but the door being locked (intentionally or otherwise), combined with the pilot banging on the door outside and no answer, leads one to a logical conclusion about copilot intent: he meant to do this
the door could have malfunctioned AND the copilot didn't care about banging on the door?
i guess the door could have malfunctioned AND the copilot had a stroke
but everything in life is a calculated consideration of possibilities, and now we're going from "chance of winning the lottery" to "chance of winning the lottery 100 times in a row"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So now we want our drone pilots to take over passenger aviation controls the moment it's suspected an aircraft leaves it's projected path.
Maybe we should, if there is only one person in the cockpit. This is not just a single freak event. The same thing happened on Egypt Air 990. The copilot deliberately locked the pilot out, and then flew the plane into the sea while chanting "I rely on God". And we still don't know what happened to Malaysia Air 370.
Intentional crashes appear to be about as common as terrorist attacks. So they should be taken seriously.