Forty-eight hours ago, German Wings 4U 9525, en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf took an unexpected dive over the French Alps and crashed into a mountainside killing all 151 people on board. In the early hours of the investigation, the assumption was a technical failure had caused the catastrophe. But as the flight recorders were found, it seems that there is a more sinister explanation. At this point we know that the pilot was locked out of the cockpit. The plane was in the sole charge of 28 year old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz. In the last moments of the plane’s descent we hear the pilot trying to kick the door in and retake control of the plane to no avail. The rest is history.

The scenario is oddly reminiscent of the MH370 crash over a year ago. In this disaster, a plane diverted from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and was lost somewhere over the Southern Ocean several hours later. It has never been located. Since no technical issues were reported, the assumption is that the pilot was on a suicide mission. All the cockpit recorders had been disabled. The enquiry has focused on the mental health of the pilot.

Let’s focus for a minute on the daily life of a pilot and the “hygiene” factors in the airline business. Flying a plane nowadays is reported to be a tedious endeavour. Apart from takeoff and landing, pilots spend long boring hours in cramped quarters doing not much. Moreover, from a social perspective, it is rather lonely. Flight crews are brought together for a return flight and then disbanded. A pilot may not see another pilot for months. So there is little camaraderie. The chance to build context, unlike in so many other jobs, is low. Couple this with a disturbed sleep pattern ( highly correlated with depression), getting up very early or flying in late and thus also an irregular social life, it’s surprising that more pilots are not a bit gaga. When most of us feel low we have a boss we can talk to. Pilots lead a lonely existence in an industry where pay is only going down. And I haven’t even mentioned airline food!

Last year, after MH370 the boss of Kiwi Airlines said: “There is a fundamental desire to ignore the mental health problem in the airline industry”.

Today the twittersphere is alive with stupidity, calling Lubitz a terrorist amongst other things. The fact is that anyone who deliberately flies himself and 150 other human beings into a mountain is mentally unwell. If it turns out to be suicide this will bring the death toll of planes that have crashed at the hands of a suicidal pilot to over 800 in the last three decades. When there was a spate of suicide at Apple’s Foxconn production facility in Taiwan, Apple got on top of it and improved the working conditions of the employees. Maybe it’s time the airline industry took a long hard look at itself

Andreas Lubitz in happier times.

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