That trust was what led to this incident where someone just walked into the airplane dressed as a maintainence worker and nobody stopped him.
Also pilot suicide isn't something new and the aviation world has tried to come up with several regulations to ensure it doesn't happen even though we completely trust pilots on a normalative basis.
That trust was what led to this incident where someone just walked into the airplane dressed as a maintainence worker and nobody stopped him.
O, it can be even worse, when you realize its a 30 year old problem ...
During the 1998 television show Schalkse Ruiters, presenters Bart De Pauw and Tom Lenaerts dressed in fake pilot uniforms. They bypassed security at Brussels Airport (Zaventem), entered a Boeing cockpit, and left undetected to expose safety flaws
The TV show got cancelled not long after this incident because of pollical backlash.
The show had a reputation of finding security flaws (like being able to transfer money from people bank accounts) and other issues, but the airport one was the end of the show.
People loved the show, as it forced companies, ... make changes to their processes that they normally never did. They even did follow-up episodes to see if the companies actually made changes.
Bit of public shaming to fix security issues... worked great. Until the show was cancelled. The number one rated show of the country ... Yea, there was absolute no correlation between its cancellation and the airport incident. Really ;)
I shared the link to the entire article so not sure how I left that out. And yes, there was a hole in the airport fence but he got so far because people trust these workers but that can be abused. And in that case (sky king), the guy was actually a maintainence worker who stole the plane. So just saying its okay to be vulnerable just because we trust all actors around the vulnerability, especially when its as easy as a freaking hole to abuse that trust is not a strong argument. RIP Sky King.
I mean yeah that's why we cannot just "trust". And yes, in that case, there was nothing that could be done but its a case of mental illness and we can look into how regulations and airlines handle mental health issues in pilots. There are regulations for this across all airlines, they failed in this case. So yes, at that moment in time, there is nothing you can do if the other pilot freaking turns off the engine as you begin to climb but there is absolutely things you can do to the best of your ability to ensure such a person shouldn't be allowed to fly / be in that situation in the first person.
Until such a time where rent/paying for housing is no longer a thing and we have a good social safety net, it will just mean pilots will keep their mental health problems under wraps to avoid losing their jobs and becoming homeless.
I wonder of such regulations are in fact counterproductive if it means people don't seek out help when they can and let the problem escalate instead (since you presumably don't go from healthy to murder-suicidal in one day, and early intervention could resolve the problem).
Yes we can argue how effective the regulations are etc and yes there is a validity to the fact that they can fail since they clearly have. What I was talking about is that the concept of regulations exist because we don't just trust the pilots on any inherent basis so we need checks like regulations which try to shift the trust from the individual to the process which is much more comforting to the average passenger.
Air travel is weird in the sense that pilots do have an immense amount of power and the fact that there have been so few pilot suicide cases shows that regulations for that are somewhat working.
which is much more comforting to the average passenger
Indeed I wonder how much of aviation-related security theatre is more for the perception of safety than any measurable safety improvements.
there have been so few pilot suicide cases
I'm not sure it's conclusively possible to attribute this to regulations without a "control case" of a different profession lacking such regulations and that has a higher rate of murder-suicide-by-vehicle. It could just be that the low rates are because there just aren't that many suicidal people willing to kill innocent bystanders in the process.
To be clear I'm not arguing for less regulations as I'm not qualified and don't have all the facts, but bringing up a counterpoint that the current regulations might cause people to conceal their mental health troubles until they escalate (and the current low - but non-zero - rates of incidents are in spite of the regulations rather than because).
Comments
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/06/avalon-airp...
That trust was what led to this incident where someone just walked into the airplane dressed as a maintainence worker and nobody stopped him.
Also pilot suicide isn't something new and the aviation world has tried to come up with several regulations to ensure it doesn't happen even though we completely trust pilots on a normalative basis.
O, it can be even worse, when you realize its a 30 year old problem ...
During the 1998 television show Schalkse Ruiters, presenters Bart De Pauw and Tom Lenaerts dressed in fake pilot uniforms. They bypassed security at Brussels Airport (Zaventem), entered a Boeing cockpit, and left undetected to expose safety flaws
The TV show got cancelled not long after this incident because of pollical backlash.
The show had a reputation of finding security flaws (like being able to transfer money from people bank accounts) and other issues, but the airport one was the end of the show.
People loved the show, as it forced companies, ... make changes to their processes that they normally never did. They even did follow-up episodes to see if the companies actually made changes.
Bit of public shaming to fix security issues... worked great. Until the show was cancelled. The number one rated show of the country ... Yea, there was absolute no correlation between its cancellation and the airport incident. Really ;)
I'm sorry, what now? Did an LLM tell you that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schalkse_Ruiters#History
Fixed ...
You conveniently left out the part where he walked through a hole in the airport fence.
Airfields are expected to be secure areas. If you can walk through a hole in a fence there's issues.
Remember a guy stole an entire airplane a few years ago (RIP Sky King). Airplanes don't have ignition keys.
The only subset I've seen with keys are old single-prop Cessnas (makes sense) but every old codger just leaves their keys in the plane anyways.
Sooooooome private jets actually bother to slap a Medeco on the external doors, at least, but that's still the only control keeping you grounded.
Is that the legend who managed to do a loop-the-loop?
You know it is.
I shared the link to the entire article so not sure how I left that out. And yes, there was a hole in the airport fence but he got so far because people trust these workers but that can be abused. And in that case (sky king), the guy was actually a maintainence worker who stole the plane. So just saying its okay to be vulnerable just because we trust all actors around the vulnerability, especially when its as easy as a freaking hole to abuse that trust is not a strong argument. RIP Sky King.
As AI171 has shown, turning the engines off on rotation does it reliably and there’s nothing that the other pilot or regulations can do to prevent it.
I mean yeah that's why we cannot just "trust". And yes, in that case, there was nothing that could be done but its a case of mental illness and we can look into how regulations and airlines handle mental health issues in pilots. There are regulations for this across all airlines, they failed in this case. So yes, at that moment in time, there is nothing you can do if the other pilot freaking turns off the engine as you begin to climb but there is absolutely things you can do to the best of your ability to ensure such a person shouldn't be allowed to fly / be in that situation in the first person.
Until such a time where rent/paying for housing is no longer a thing and we have a good social safety net, it will just mean pilots will keep their mental health problems under wraps to avoid losing their jobs and becoming homeless.
I wonder of such regulations are in fact counterproductive if it means people don't seek out help when they can and let the problem escalate instead (since you presumably don't go from healthy to murder-suicidal in one day, and early intervention could resolve the problem).
Yes we can argue how effective the regulations are etc and yes there is a validity to the fact that they can fail since they clearly have. What I was talking about is that the concept of regulations exist because we don't just trust the pilots on any inherent basis so we need checks like regulations which try to shift the trust from the individual to the process which is much more comforting to the average passenger.
Air travel is weird in the sense that pilots do have an immense amount of power and the fact that there have been so few pilot suicide cases shows that regulations for that are somewhat working.
Indeed I wonder how much of aviation-related security theatre is more for the perception of safety than any measurable safety improvements.
I'm not sure it's conclusively possible to attribute this to regulations without a "control case" of a different profession lacking such regulations and that has a higher rate of murder-suicide-by-vehicle. It could just be that the low rates are because there just aren't that many suicidal people willing to kill innocent bystanders in the process.
To be clear I'm not arguing for less regulations as I'm not qualified and don't have all the facts, but bringing up a counterpoint that the current regulations might cause people to conceal their mental health troubles until they escalate (and the current low - but non-zero - rates of incidents are in spite of the regulations rather than because).