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4. The Pilot Who Locked the Door: Germanwings 9525 (2015)
Until 2015, the biggest worries for airlines were terrorism or mechanical failure. Nobody expected the danger to be sitting in the co-pilot’s seat.
The flight was heading from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. The captain left to use the restroom, leaving the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, alone in the cockpit. When he came back, the door was locked.
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From the outside, the captain pounded on the armored door, screaming to get in. Inside? Absolute silence. Only the sound of Lubitz’s calm breathing, captured by the black box, as he programmed the autopilot to drive the plane straight into the French Alps.
It wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate. Lubitz was suffering from severe depression and had hidden it from his employer. This case changed the “Two-Person Rule”: today, in many airlines, if a pilot leaves the cockpit, a flight attendant must enter. No one is ever left alone in there.
5. The Plane That Fell Belly-First: Air France 447 (2009)
The Airbus A330 flying from Rio to Paris was a technological jewel. But when it hit a storm and the speed sensors froze over, the computer “gave up” and handed control back to the pilots.
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Confused and flying blind in the dark, they made a fatal error: they pulled the nose of the plane up. This caused the plane to lose lift (stall). The aircraft fell for 3 minutes and 30 seconds, flat, belly-first, until it hit the Atlantic Ocean.
If they had just let go of the stick, the nose would have dropped, and the plane would have regained speed and flown. The lesson? Training. Technology is great, but humans need to know what to do when it fails.
And now, the last case. Perhaps the most painful one, because it was purely avoidable…