WASHINGTON - TelAve -- When one pilot on a  Flydubai commercial jet flight stabbed the other pilot so that he could crash the airplane, a mass murder was prevented only because the injured pilot was somehow able to unlock the cockpit door so that other crew could take over and successfully land the plane.

But, if the hero pilot had been too seriously injured to unlock the cockpit door, or had been prevented from doing so by the suicidal pilot, another mass airline tragedy would almost certainly have occurred.

Although many large commercial airliners have an emergency/override access mechanism which permits crew outside the cockpit to open the door by entering a numeric code, even this can be locked out by a single pilot because the cockpit has a three-position switch (commonly labeled UNLOCK / NORM / LOCK, or equivalent).  If a suicidal pilot throws the switch to the "LOCK" position, the door cannot be opened from outside, even if the crew enters the proper code.

To prevent what happened to Germanwings Flight 9525 (24 March 2015) - when the first officer locked the captain out of the cockpit so he could crash the plane - and in many other similar incidents, an MIT-educated inventor and professor at George Washington University proposed utilizing a fail-safe mechanism; one widely used to prevent any one person from unleashing a nuclear bomb, to improve the cockpit locking mechanism on large commercial jet liners.

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It would continue to permit the crew outside the cockpit to unlock the door during an emergency by entering a code, and also prevent such entry-by-code if absolutely necessary.

However, instead of permitting only one person (who may be suicidal or otherwise deranged) from disabling the entry-by-code locking mechanism, it would require two persons simultaneously throwing switches (or pushing buttons) located at opposite ends of the airplane's instrument panel to lock out crew members outside the cockpit.

With such a simple mechanism in place, the Flydubai threat would have been thwarted, even if the injured pilot had been unable to unlock the cabin door.

For more information, see:
One Cause of Germanwings Crash Was Negligent Switch Design (https://eurweb.com/one-cause-of-germanwings-crash-was-negligent-switch-design/)

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