On March 24, 2015, a Germanwings Airbus flight 9525 took off from Barcelona, Spain. It was carrying 144 passengers and six crew members. Thirty minutes later, as it was flying over the snow-capped French Alps everything looked fine. The plane was cruising at its usual altitude when it nosedived and before the shocked passengers could understand anything, it crashed into one of the mountains. All 150 on were killed in the crash.

The aviation world went into a tizzy. An investigation was launched immediately. What the Bureau of Inquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) investigators found was chilling: the 27-year-old co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, crashed the plane willingly. He was suffering from depression for a long time. When the captain went to the washroom during the flight, Lubitz bolted the cockpit door from inside. Then, he took control of the plane and turned it downwards and accelerated. The cockpit voice recorder suggested that the captain tried hard to open the cockpit door but failed. His efforts went in vain resulting in terrible tragedy.

Those unaware should know that after the 9/11 terror attack, cockpit doors were reconfigured so that they couldn’t be opened from outside.

After the incident, aviation authorities in India and the world made presence of two people in the cockpit mandatory. If any one of the two — the captain or the co-pilot — steps out........

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