Flying is becoming more stressful these days not just for passengers but also for flight crew. Airline job-related stresses have increased all round as financial crises have taken their toll, forcing crew members to work longer hours without compensation or time off. Of course, as analyst point, airline pilots are not the only ones facing job-related stresses. However, they do carry a ‘unique responsibility for multi-million dollar vehicles and the hundreds of people they carry’. And as a group, no pilots have faced more stress recently than those working for budget carriers, Germanwings among them.
It’s still not clear whether co-pilot Andreas Lubitz really did the unthinkable: deliberately sent the Germanwings Flight 9525 into a steep descent into a mountainside in the French Alps on March 24, killing himself and 149 others on board. Some pilots have rushed to Lubitz’s defence, saying it’s too early to come to such an awful conclusion, despite initial findings from the cockpit voice recorder. Still, with all the evidence pointing to Lubitz’s disturbed mental state, Occam’s razor is likely to apply. A focus now is how much the stress of working for a budget airline, with all the ruthless cost-cutting involved, might have contributed to his actions. – Marika Sboros.
By Richard Weiss and Tino Andresen
Germanwings and Lufthansa airplanes at Dusseldorf airport. REUTERS/Albert Gea
Bloomberg – Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year-old pilot prosecutors allege deliberately crashed Germanwings Flight 9525, belonged to a young generation of airmen for whom the allure of life in the cockpit is overshadowed by the realities of a profession with no job guarantee or room for failing health.
Lubitz, who investigators say locked his captain out of the cockpit before directing the plane into a French mountain slope, killing himself and the other 149 people on board the Airbus A320, may have harbored a diagnosis that threatened to end his career. Prosecutors retrieved unfilled prescriptions for tranquilisers to fight depression, according to Bild Zeitung, which didn’t say how it obtained the information.
The revelations about his medical history may shed some light on Lubitz’s state of mind and whether he may have cracked under the realissation that his failing health was jeopardising his ambitions. Lubitz tore up doctors’ notes that declared him unfit to work, including on the day of the crash, suggesting he sought to hide his diagnosis from his employer and colleagues.
“He seemed completely normal,” Frank Woiton, a Germanwings captain who flew with Lubitz to Vienna in recent weeks, said in an interview with WDR television.
Woiton said Lubitz told him he was happy to finally fly for the group, and that he wanted to pilot long-haul routes and become a captain on the Boeing Co. 747 or the Airbus A380, the two biggest commercial aircraft.
No illusions
The investigation of the worst disaster in German aviation history points to a potentially disturbed junior pilot whose dream of one day flying the most imposing planes may have been unraveling as he battled a mental condition. Lubitz also suffered from a detached retina, blurring his vision – potentially a career-ending diagnosis for a pilot, Bild Zeitung said.
Dusseldorf police, who searched Lubitz’s apartment in the city, currently have about 100 officers working on the case, which the department has codenamed “Alps.” The police are gathering DNA samples from the victims’ families to aid in the identification of the bodies.
Investigators have isolated 78 different types of DNA at the crash site, AFP reported, citing prosecutors. The genetic information will be compared with that of the families of the victims for identification, according to AFP. Police declined to comment on the investigations, while prosecutors couldn’t be reached for comment on the Bild report.
Sick notes
Deutsche Lufthansa AG, the parent of low-cost carrier Germanwings, puts aspiring pilots under no illusions about the demands of a career commandeering the skies.
“The heartbeat, the passion and the enthusiasm for this exciting and diverse job will come by itself,” the company says on a website informing would-be pilots about prospects.
“There is, however, another side for those choosing this profession. Flying can at times be a tough, rigorous job, demanding mental resilience and peak physical performance.”
The co-pilot, who lived in the same town as Woiton, was being treated by several neurologists and psychiatrists for an unspecified psychosomatic illness, according to a person close to the probe. The authorities haven’t yet recovered the data recorder that may conclusively depict Lubitz’s final actions before the fatal crash in the French Alps last Tuesday.
Constant stress
“Pilots are subject to constant stress levels; I think that changes personalities,” said Bryan Ware, chief technology officer at Haystax Technology in Los Angeles, which helps companies rank employees by the likelihood that they may pose a threat to the organisation.
“Someone who has significant financial, or family, or psychological issues will likely not be able to handle that kind of stress in the same way that someone who doesn’t.”
Student pilots seeking employment at Lufthansa have to undergo rigorous assessment centers, with participants estimating that fewer than 10% pass muster. Lubitz qualified in 2008 after taking several months leave for reasons unknown to Lufthansa before completing his training.
For those who make it through, the job prospects have become gloomier as Lufthansa capped its fleet and laid out a strategy to create Europe’s third-largest low-cost carrier under the Eurowings brand, with working conditions less generous than at the more upmarket Lufthansa airline.
Holding pattern
Until 2012, Lufthansa had started training classes for about 200 students a year, suspending the program at its flight school in Bremen in northern Germany in 2013 after capping its fleet at the main Lufthansa brand at about 400 planes. The cap meant it required about 1,000 fewer pilots.
While training classes were briefly re-introduced, the carrier has since again halted the program. Lufthansa has as many as 900 entry-level candidates at various stages of pilot training, according to Joerg Handwerg, a spokesman for the Vereinigung Cockpit pilots lobby group. All vacancies for classes in 2016 can be filled with candidates selected for postponed tuition, the carrier has said.
Some candidates have been waiting as long as three years to land a job, Handwerg said. With licenses tied to Lufthansa, they can’t work for other airlines in the meantime, he said.
Either way, prospects at competitors aren’t much better as the industry grapples with increasing competition from low-cost carriers. Air Berlin Plc, Germany’s second-largest airline, is in the process of trimming its fleet and cutting jobs, including some in the cockpit.
Training costs
Training can set candidates back 70,000 euros ($76,000) in fees, an unusually costly education in a country where even university tuitions are low by international standards.
Some candidates work as flight attendants to bridge the gap, as Lubitz did for 11 months, or in other positions within Lufthansa. Others go to university to continue their education.
“The student pilots are completely dependent on Lufthansa,” said Handwerg. “Many go to university or educate themselves further, but that’s hard to do as they constantly have to be on standby. Under such circumstances there’s no way you can plan your future life. It’s an extremely unpleasant situation.”
So who would want to work under the conditions set by budget airlines? Any pilot desperate for a job – of which there are plenty, thanks to the crippling levels of debt that aspiring pilots often rack up while studying at expensive flight training programs.
Budget carriers have a reputation for exploiting this desperation. Last month, Bloomberg reported that low-cost carriers are “chasing the lowest pay and most relaxed work rules for pilots,” which creates uncomfortable questions about “safety oversight.”
Ideally, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations’ aviation agency, would interrupt this race to the bottom by setting psychological safety standards for pilots. But ICAO has long dismissed the utility of psychological testing. In its Manual of Civil Aviation Medicine, it said such tests are “rarely of value.”
Lax standards
As a result, each country sets its own standards for how pilots should be evaluated psychologically once they’ve been certified and hired – and those standards tend to be lax. Some countries, including the United States, don’t mandate any formal psychological evaluations for active pilots. Rather, they roll them into a pilot’s regularly scheduled medical examinations.
The US Federal Aviation Administration’s guidelines for performing such check-ups are underwhelming. Physicians are asked to draw“a general impression of the emotional stability and mental state of the applicant.”
if something seems off, the physician can recommend a formal psychological evaluation that – if failed – can lead to serious penalties, including suspension. For pilots suffering from depression or other mental illnesses, this provides a strong incentive to lie, and a disincentive to seek treatment.
A better system would require pilots to undergo more rigorous and regular psychological screenings performed by psychologists, not physicians. And during those tests, pilots should be assured that they have the option of seeking treatment without having to fear losing their jobs. As one anonymous pilot quoted by The Atlantic’s James Fallows puts it: “The aeromedical system could start with the premise that their job is not to keep people out of the cockpit, but to put them in one safely.”
For now, we can’t say if additional screening would have flagged Lubitz. But even if it failed, the information gleaned from widespread screening would provide airlines and regulators with a far better understanding of their pilots. It might even encourage them to take steps to improve their mental health. – Bloomberg
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