The Failure of Government Regulations: On the Deliberate Crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 and a Chilling Thought for All of Us

Investigators are now of the opinion that the co-pilot of the Germanwings airliner that crashed in the French Alps killing all 150 people aboard appears to have brought the A320 Airbus down deliberately, the Marseille prosecutor said today.

German Andreas Lubitz, 28, left in sole control of the Airbus A320 after the captain left the cockpit, refused to re-open the door and operated a control that sent the plane into its final, fatal descent, the prosecutor told a news conference.

Here is what caught my eye about recent reports:

"The guy outside [the captain] is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer," an investigator described only as a senior French military official told the New York Times, citing the recordings. "And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer."

"You can hear he is trying to smash the door down," the investigator added.

Those tamper proof doors were installed after 9-11, to prevent attacks on the pilots. But in this case it served to protect a mad pilot.

Bottom line: It is impossible to create a completely safe and secure world. Government regulations will never do it. Having tamper proof doors in planes is probably a good idea in most cases, in this case it wasn't.

The idea that government can solve all problems is a myth. Which brings me to government created nuclear weapons. Stephen L. Carter writes:

[The crash of  Flight 9525] stands as a chilling reminder of how difficult it is to harden our systems entirely against attack. The human factor is always a variable for which we cannot fully account. Eric Schlosser, in his book “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety,” tells us how planners agonized for decades over how to prevent a crazed individual from stealing or detonating a nuclear weapon. Even if guarded against outsiders, the systems couldn’t be completely protected against insiders. His chilling conclusion is that the problem was never really solved: We’ve just been lucky.

And there should be no comfort in the fact that these weapons are controlled by individuals who are in the first place government trained killers. Governments need to be shrunk everywhere and in every sector but especially in sectors where a mad man can do nuclear level destruction.

  -RW