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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Since July 1997, over a dozen passengers have attempted to breach cockpit doors during commercial airline flights. We've been lucky so far.
Apr 8, 2000 | On March 16, aboard Alaska Airlines flight 259 from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco, a man did something that angry, frightened, deranged and intoxicated passengers are doing with alarming frequency these days: He broke through the cockpit door and attacked the pilots. Provoked (or so his attorney claims) by a bad reaction to blood-pressure medicine, Peter Bradley, 39, shouted, "I'm going to kill you," and lunged for the controls.
Having been alerted of the impending attack, the co-pilot was armed with an ax. He fought with Bradley, suffering a cut to his hand that would require eight stitches. Struggling to fly the plane during this tight-quartered assault, the pilot made an urgent plea for help over the intercom. At least seven passengers responded. The 6-foot-2, 250-pound assailant was snatched from the cockpit, wrestled to the ground, bound hand and foot with plastic restraints and taken into custody by federal authorities upon landing in San Francisco. A potential airplane disaster was averted. But what might have happened if no one had responded to the captain's plea? Or what if the response had been too little or too late?
Eleven days later, on March 27, an airplane cockpit was the scene of yet another in-flight battle. This time the results were even scarier. A German man broke into the flight deck during a Germania charter flight from Berlin to the Canary Islands. The man, believed by authorities to have been under the influence of alcohol, forced his way into the cockpit while the plane was over Spanish airspace. Once inside, reports say, he threatened the pilots and told them the plane was under assault by "terrorists." He then proceeded to punch, kick and choke the 59-year-old pilot.
At some point the attacker managed to grab the controls. The aircraft veered from its flight path and lost altitude briefly, but the co-pilot managed to stabilize it. "Help, we need strong men, we need strong men!" the co-pilot reportedly announced. Four passengers from Sweden, Russia and Germany, along with flight attendants, responded to his plea and managed to subdue the attacker. A spokesman for Germania, a charter company operated by LTU, said "There was no real danger at any point for the passengers." This statement is a crock of public-relations bullshit, pungent enough to wrinkle noses on both sides of the Atlantic. Everyone aboard the aircraft was in danger, all 143 passengers and crew. Why else would the co-pilot be screaming for help?
During the past few years, passenger attacks against flight attendants have been well documented by the media. Cabin personnel have been slammed against bulkheads, put into headlocks, punched, kicked, spat at, urinated upon, hit over the head with beer bottles and threatened with their lives. These in-flight assaults are extremely rare, yet more and more air ragers find themselves traveling to that final destination behind bars. Horrible though it may be, when a flight attendant is attacked, the safety of an aircraft and its passengers is not always at issue. When someone breaks through the cockpit door, however, when someone poses a physical threat to the only two people qualified to keep an aircraft aloft, the potential for disaster makes it everybody's issue.
The cockpit door is the only barrier between a kamikaze passenger and an unsuspecting pilot. It is a marginal defense, built for ease of crew entry and as an emergency escape, not as a fortification against determined intruders. The Alaska Airlines ordeal prompted five popular airlines (Alaska, American, Delta, Northwest and TWA) to announce, just one week after the incident, that they are seeking ways to fortify bifold cockpit doors -- standard on MD-83 aircraft -- like the one Bradley was able to break through. "The one thing you can't do is put a bank vault door on the cockpit," said Alaska Airlines spokesman Jack Evans. "The door needs to be secure, but it also needs to be an emergency exit as well."
Paradoxically, some international carriers allow the cockpit door to remain unlocked during a flight. Any passenger can walk right in, even those who might mistake the cockpit for the lavatory. U.S. airlines adopt a quite different policy, however. They require that the cockpit door remain locked at all times during flight, except, of course, while crew members are entering and exiting. In this respect, pilots and flight attendants carry cockpit keys as standard equipment. But in one particularly appalling incident, a cockpit key gave a deranged passenger access to the flight deck and the consequences were fatal.
