Thursday, March 26, 2015

Can We Trust The Airline Staff?

By now we have all heard about the disastrous crash of a German Airliner on its way from Spain to Germany. As it appears the airplane was crashed deliberately by the co-pilot being alone in the cockpit. The pilot himself had been locked out by his co-pilot and apparently has tried to smash the door in an attempt to get back into the cockpit.
This information was derived through the black-box recordings.

Everyone who has flown with a commercial airline has a certain idea of what terrible situation ensued in this case.

If this despicable act is not the result of any organized terrorism it must be the action of a “Lone Wolf” who thought he had to contribute to damage the West. It is not known whether this man had made an attempt to contact any terror organisation prior to making plans to down the airliner. His motivation might be a different one and I am sure that investigators and police will make any attempt to find the cause of what was going on. 

There is no meaning in speculating too much about it without having hard facts.

However, the emerging question is whether or not we can trust that airline employees are screened carefully prior to employment.
Ever since after 9-11, authorities have made passenger access to airplanes much more restrictive. Security checks at all airports have all but eliminated terror acts on board of planes.

But is there a loop-hole in the system? Could under-cover terrorists get jobs at airlines to do massive damage? The disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 comes to mind.  Where did it go, what happened?

We will never be able to rely on that technical failures cannot happen, but when people’s reliability is involved, we should be able to trust them.

But can we?

2 comments:

  1. It's not just airline staff. It's anyone that you put your life in control of others. It could be bus drivers, police or anyone else. Extensive background checks are done on any airline employee allowed behind security at the airport in the US. However, just like background checks for anything else, some things change the person and other things don't show up at all.

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  2. The human factor is far and away the largest contributing factor to aircraft incidents and likely to most other "accidents" as well.

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