A catastrophe avoided shortly? Last year, on February 17, 2024, a flight from Lufthansa between Seville and Frankfurt was not manned for almost 10 minutes. The co -piloto had passed out while the captain was in the bathroom, reveals the German agency DPA, citing the CIAIAC report, a Spanish research commission, equivalent to the BEA (Office of Research and Safety Analysis of Civil Aviation) in France.
The device, an Airbus A321 that later transported 199 passengers, with 6 crew members, therefore, stolen for approximately 10 minutes without a pilot. Nothing to worry about a priori with the automatic pilot activated, but the circumstances are still quite disturbing.
An emergency code to enter the cabin
Unconscious, the co -piloto would still have managed the orders involuntarily, but the plane remained stable, precisely thanks to the very active automatic piloting.
The audio recorder that captures the sounds in the cabin “recorded strange noises in the cabin, compatible with an acute medical emergency,” DPA said.
The captain took a while before being able to return to the cabin. First he seized the usual opening code, which triggers a call tone in the cabin and invites the co -piloto to unlock the door. Despite this lack of reaction from the only person present in the cabin, the commander would have tried this first code five times, while a host tried to contact the co -piloto through a phone on board.
Therefore, the pilot would have entered an emergency code that allowed him to access the cabin, even if the co -pilot could have opened the door despite his discomfort, just before the automatic opening activated by this procedure. Once back in the control, the commander chose to land in Madrid, so that his colleague was treated in a hospital.
Procedures that have changed from the 2015 shock suicide
If the cabins have become safes since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the accident of a Germanwings device in 2015 caused by a suicide co -pilot has changed certain practices.
If one of the pilots has to go to the bathroom, “what was initially requested is that another member of the crew, host or butler, enters the cabin to never leave a driver alone on board,” recently explained to BFMTV Charles Clair, airline pilot, with motives of the 10 years of the German accident A320.
A second-person procedure in the cabin visibly not respected during this flight of Seville-Francfort, which can be explained by the diversity of the measures practiced and a certain vagueness for safety reasons in civil aviation.
“The systems are different depending on the devices and airlines so as not to have a standard standard and prevent possible terrorists from knowing how it works from one company to another and from one type of plane to another,” explained a manufacturer of the AFP aeronautical sector in 2015.
Source: BFM TV
