A violent intrusion into the cockpit of a British Airways Boeing 747-400 over Sudan, and the consequent dramatic aircraft manoeuvres, caused fright and severe distress to everyone on board the aircraft, including the flight crew. The incident will inevitably cause the industry to review cockpit security measures, but hopefully the intent will be to find the best solution rather than play to the press.
The relationship between the cockpit crew and all those in the rest of the aircraft is vital. An attempt to lock the flight crew completely away from cabin crew and the passengers could have operational and psychological disadvantages which would do more harm to safety than any of the gains to be had from reducing the risk of hostile cockpit intrusion, which has been rare.
Making a physical fortress of the cockpit can only ever reduce the opportunity for intrusion; it cannot eliminate it. So any change in policy would be an exercise in balancing risks.
Consider the "hijack" of a domestic All Nippon Airways 747-400 flight in July 1999, where a computer games enthusiast wanted to fly the aircraft. He took a stewardess hostage, holding a knife to her throat. He gained flight deck access and flew the aircraft for a while before being overpowered. Even armoured cockpit doors are no barrier to people who are determined and know what they are doing. Although the cockpit doors of US carriers are kept locked, the cabin crew regularly open them to deliver meals, drinks, paperwork, or to discuss cabin management problems. A potential intruder could gain entry while the door is open. US carriers do not have any drills for this.
But would anything really be lost in adopting a "fortress flight deck" policy? When CRM training for pilots was first introduced in the mid-1970s, the acronym stood for Cockpit Resource Management. The acronym has not changed, but the training philosophy has. Now it stands for Crew Resource Management - meaning the entire crew, cockpit and cabin. There are arguments that the philosophy should be altered further, calling it Team Resource Management, including the passengers as a part of the team. In the case of the British Airways 747, although the crew pulled the intruder clear of the controls, it took the help of two large male passengers to restrain him.
When a British Midland 737-400 crashed on approach to East Midlands airport, UK in January 1989, the technical inquiry found that a primary cause had been the failure of a fan blade in one of the engines, but the crucial problem was that the crew had shut down the good engine, and the damaged one failed on final approach. That was the technical verdict. When the Coroners Court examined the case and non-aviation minds were applied to the chain of events, the Coroner was astounded to find that the cabin crew and the passengers had seen a flash of fire from the left engine as the fan blade failed, but no-one told the flight deck about it. The stewardess who saw it, and the other cabin crew to whom the passengers reported what they had seen, thought the pilot would know all about what had happened. The 737 took 20min to descend, with the damaged engine at idle power, during which the crew could have relit the good engine if the cabin crew had told them what they had seen.
To this day the crew act and think as two different teams on most aircraft, although training has slightly reduced the feeling of separation. What pilots do to perform their task of getting the aircraft safely from A to B is still a mystery to most cabin crew, and on the whole they think it is not their business. Actually, it is, as the East Midlands accident illustrates powerfully.
Meanwhile, a fortress cockpit could isolate cabin crew help when, for example, one of the pilots collapses physically on the controls with a heart attack. Rare though this may be, cockpit intrusions by opportunists or unstable people are even more rare, as the 27 December pilot collapse on a transatlantic Continental Airlines 777 illustrates. But the US approach should not be ruled out. As one US pilot recently said on the pilot internet forum Professional Pilots Rumour Network, it's a risk/reward trade-off.
Source: Flight International
