IN THE aftermath of the deliberate crashing of Germanwings Flight 9525, pilots cautioned against a knee-jerk reaction to the tragedy by airlines and safety regulators. With hindsight, perhaps, alarm bells should have been ringing about Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year-old first officer who flew his plane into the French Alps, killing 150. He had been treated for severe depression in 2009, and is thought to have hidden sick notes from his bosses before the crash. Yet we also know that Germanwings followed industry guidelines for dealing with mental-health concerns. Harbouring gloomy thoughts does not preclude someone from having a pilot’s licence. According toUSA Today, as many as 1,500 American pilots are currently prescribed anti-depressants.
Though unnerving, the industry’s approach makes sense. Pilots, after all, are humans. They can be struck down by medical ailments—physical or mental—just like anybody. Stripping them of their livelihood at the first sign of melancholy would not protect passengers; to the contrary, it would endanger lives. Faced with an ultimatum between treatment and employment, many depressed pilots would hide their condition from their airline. It may then deteriorate. The threat of termination could also raise stress levels on the flight-deck, increasing the likelihood of human-factor accidents.
Nonetheless, psychologists think they are an under-used resource for pilot safety. According to the European Association for Aviation Psychology (EAAP), there have been six murder-suicide crashes by commercial pilots since 1980. That includes LAM Mozambique Flight 470, which was downed by captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes in November 2013 under harrowingly similar circumstances to the Gemanwings incident. Fernandes, like Lubitz, locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit during a toilet break, before crashing the jet and killing 33. He had suffered personal torment of a different nature: the loss of his son to an apparent suicide. He, too, underwent psychological treatment before receiving a clean bill of health from his employer.
Mental-health evaluations within the airline industry are surprisingly unregimented. ICAO, the UN’s aviation body, issues non-binding guidance on the subject. Its Manual of Civil Aviation Medicine states that psychological testing is “rarely of value”. This nonchalance is imbibed by national regulators. Britain’s civil aviation authority devotes just six lines of its four-page medical document to psychiatric assessments. The most probing questions come in the earliest stage of a pilot’s career. Personality tests weed out worrisome character traits—depressive, psychopathic, aggressive and so on—before flight training begins. “But,” EAAP notes, “they cannot forecast what happens later in life.” Having earned their wings, pilots undergo medical examinations annually, or twice a year for over-40s. These include psychiatric questions—enquiring, among other things, about mood, family relations, substance abuse and sleep patterns—but they are not conducted by clinical psychologists. EAAP therefore believes the assessments “may be rather cursory and [can] miss depressive or other conditions”.
At the moment, self-reporting and peer-reporting are an airline’s primary defence against psychological problems in the cockpit. This seems logical. Pilots should be reasonably forthcoming with personal issues as long as they have faith in their employers’ support network. Co-pilots, meanwhile, observe each other in close quarters for extended periods, and have a vested interest in flagging up trouble. But the threat of being grounded still has a chilling effect. “Who willingly admits to anything that could lead to a suspension of their licence?” one Asian captain asked in an interview with Reuters. “I won't. I need my job." Revelations that Lubitz withheld medical records from Germanwings underscore this reality.
EAAP believes the solution is regular examinations by clinical psychologists, combined with improved storage and sharing of medical records. Pilots unions oppose such measures. Given that both sides have valid concerns, a compromise would be sensible. Rather than introducing one-to-one psychological assessments, airlines could bring psychologists in for simulator training sessions. Their presence might actually be appreciated by pilots. In recent years, the concept of competency-based training has gained traction in flight schools. The approach incorporates a set of training procedures called Crew Resource Management, which emphasise human factors and communication between co-pilots. Psychologists have ideal skillsets for assisting instructors with the observation and feedback components of this discipline. While there, they may as well assess pilots in other ways too.
This softly-softly approach may not be enough for Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, which is now calling for random psychological tests for pilots and relaxed doctor-patient confidentiality. But other airlines may see it as a way of bringing doctors on-board without making them the bad guys. Marlene Manave, the former boss of LAM Mozambique, said of her carrier’s response to Flight 470: “There is nothing we can do, because there is nothing that we failed in … This has to do with human factors, and you cannot predict that.” In terms of aviation regulatory compliance, she is correct. But pilot murder-suicide is caused by a damaged mind, not a damaged machine. Psychologists have a valid role to play in keeping civil aviation safe.
