The GermanWings tragedy

Watching this latest aviation tragedy unfold has a little sense of deja vu about it. It was just a year ago when MH370 disappeared en route to China from Malaysia and the chances of the MAS 777 being located seem as slim as ever. The similarities here are in the likelihood of the loss being a deliberate act by one of the crew.

What prompted this post though, was the spirited defence of the suspected perpetrator in a guest editorial by Leonid Bershidsky as published on the Stuff New Zealand news feed. The general demeanour of the piece was that no matter how it might look, the suspect has the right to natural justice, one is innocent until proven guilty, and those pundits out there who are making assumptions of guilt have no right, moral or legal, to make them.

The right to a fair trial by media, if you like.

Well, if the arguments he puts forward are anything to go by, he's either not inclined to follow the path of logic, or perhaps he was just going for some sensationalism himself. Or maybe he's of the contrarian mental makeup, where he just took the position because he likes to argue.

Whichever the reason, his plea for restraint on the media assumptions is unlikely to make one iota of difference. Most of the publications he criticises are tabloids for heaven's sake. The world of the tabloid. It's what it is - sensation. And more sensation.

But in this case, the usual exaggerated rhetoric excepted, the tabloids and their close cousins, the 24 hour news channels are actually closer to the truth than Bershidsky's protestations of incomplete evidence and unfair blame.

Let's take a look at his opinion piece, shall we?

The title is wrong, for starters - 'No one knows yet that Andreas Lubitz was a killer' is demonstrably in opposition to the facts. It requires a special mindset to ignore the reality that he was alone in the cockpit during the period where the A320 was deliberately transitioned from level cruise altitude to a controlled descent into mountainous terrain. There is no other suspect. His actions and inactions resulted in his death and those of 149 other crew and passengers. He was responsible for their deaths so he was indeed their killer.

Bershidsky posits that the most damning piece of evidence against Lubitz, that of his failure to allow the airliner's captain to access the cockpit, is unconvincing.

He says "Consider the possibility that Lubitz lost consciousness while Captain Patrick Sondenheimer was out, but the captain and crew somehow had the wrong re-entry code."

Even if Lubitz lost consciousness, it certainly doesn't explain why he took the aircraft off level cruise flight and programmed it into a 4000 feet per minute descent prior to passing out. The CVR timeline shows that as soon as the captain left the cockpit, Lubitz made the changes to the aircraft's flight regime. Unconsciousness is not relevant to the co-pilot's actions at this point.

Then Bershidsky invents another desperate scenario... "Or imagine that Sondenheimer banged on the door instead of going through the required motions, as the purser does in the Airbus video. The procedure in that case calls for the pilot inside the cockpit to hit the switch to lock the door. If that's what happened, might Lubitz have panicked, thinking there was a hijacking attempt, and tried to land the plane?"

Well it's surely possible that a captain with 6000+ hours on type might forget his entry code and not have it written on a scrap of paper, and begin to behave in a totally irrational way when he just had to ask on the intercom for the door to be opened. But besides the utter unlikelihood of such a scenario, Lubitz had only to look at the CCTV of the person banging on the door to recognise his superior officer and the lack of hijackers in the tiny space adjacent to the entrance to the cockpit.

The last bit, about trying to land the plane in a mountain range, just beggars belief. No air transport pilot, no matter how "panicked", would entertain for a second the idea that he could safely land an aircraft flying at cruising speed, in a mountain range. And if Lubitz truly believed that there was a hijack in progress, why didn't he make a call to ATC to annouce it? Or just change the transponder squawk to the hijack code? Ever? By including that scenario, with or without meaning to, Bershidsky is suggesting that Lubitz might have had a complete mental meltdown. Well, if so, then regardless of any sympathy we might feel for his state of health, then it's clear that he and the other 149 human beings onboard would still have died by his hand.

Then in summary Bershidsky goes on to state that "All these versions sound implausible, of course, but so does the suggestion that Lubitz intentionally killed 150 people he did not know because he was depressed or had problems with his girlfriend".

In spite of the fact that Lubitz's reasons are not clear and contrary to the claim above, the possibility that Lubitz intentionally killed 150 people that day is not even close to being impausible. History has shown that pilots under stress are absolutely capable of commiting mass murder while ending their own lives. Was Lubitz under stress? It seems so, based on documentary evidence found by German police and independent investigations by the media

But whether his issues were with his girlfriend, his bosses or his postman for that matter, is not crucial to the finding that he was in control of the aircraft up to the time it disintegrated. He, and he alone must bear the blame for the deaths of 149 other innocent occupants of 9525. That realisation must be a horrific burden to  Lubitz's family and friends, but there's no doubt he was responsible for a mass killing.

Bershidsky finishes off with what should have been his zinger. He wrote "With so much still unknown, there's nothing that I, for one, want to know at this point about the private life of the late Andreas Lubitz. Why Flight 9525 lost altitude over those mountains is far more relevant."

On the contrary, the private life of Andreas Lubitz is central to what occurred above and on the French Alps. His mindset, familial relationships, his financial health and most important, his mental health history are all vital to understanding this tragedy. It's what makes Bershidsky's last sentence so cringe-worthy. It is why Flight 9525 lost altitude over those mountains.

I sure hope Stuff didn't pay much to Bershidsky for that ill-considered piece of rubbish.