<b>Mitali Saran:</b> The human factor

The commercial aviation industry was born on New Year's Day 1914. A Benoist "flying boat" biplane flew 35 km across Tampa Bay in 23 minutes, carrying former mayor Abram C Pheil, who bid a winning $400 at the auction for the inaugural single passenger ticket. Today, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), around 93,000 commercial passenger flights, carrying something like eight million people, take off from airports across the world every single day. Back in 1920, when KLM began operations, it transported a total of 345 passengers and 25,000 kg of cargo in its first year. Today, a single 747 aircraft carries that load on a single flight. Yet the accident rate is negligible, and accidents involving fatalities are rarer still. Airplanes have gotten good, fast. Everyone knows that flying is the safest way to travel.
 

A century of commercial aviation has changed the way that people live, think, work and love, to the point of banality. The possibilities created by flight have changed our lives in ways that we now take entirely for granted. It is just this collective dependence on aviation, and trust in it, that makes an accident halfway across the world so upsetting when it does happen: potential risks, taken so often that they are rendered virtually invisible, are suddenly dread realities. To those who fear flying, those risks, however unlikely, simply never grow invisible enough.

This last year has been a shaky one for international commercial passenger travel - not statistically, of course, but in terms of the unusualness of tragedies we've seen. The inexplicable disappearance of Malaysian Airlines's flight MH370, possibly in the southern Indian Ocean; Air Asia flight QZ8501's mysterious route deviation and subsequent crash into the Java Sea; and this week, the crash of Germanwings flight 4U9525 into a mountain in the French Alps. Finding cause, finding a reason helps provide closure and a path to acceptance; senseless, inexplicable loss remains excruciatingly painful for longer.

How, we ask ourselves, with all the radar and airplane technology available to us, in an age when we can track the smallest phone, can we simply not be able to find a large aircraft? How can we explain an uncleared climb so steep that a plane suffers an aerodynamic stall? How can we explain a co-pilot who apparently chooses to lock out the commander, sets the plane on a deadly course and lives out his last moments in calm silence, ignoring frantic communication from air-traffic controllers (ATCs) and the terrified screaming of 149 people behind the cockpit door?

Airplanes have become increasingly computerised to minimise and compensate for human error, so the Germanwings tragedy is particularly horrific because it seems to have been the deliberate intent of co-pilot Andreas Lubitz. The airplane itself appears to have functioned perfectly, to his instructions. Ongoing investigations into his life and career have so far turned up no evidence of political motive, only an as-yet unconfirmed suggestion that he was vulnerable to psychological distress. Pilot suicide, if this is what it was, wouldn't be without precedent - it was also the dominant theory for the Silk Air flight 185 crash in 1997 that killed 104 people, the EgyptAir flight 990 crash in 1999 that killed 217 people and the Air Mozambique flight 470 crash in 2013 that killed 33 people. There have been multiple other pilot suicides, though not all were carrying passengers.

Were Lubitz's actions the product of a spur-of-the-moment decision, since he couldn't have known that the captain would step out when he did (or at all)? Was he a ticking time bomb, resolved to commit premeditated suicide-cum-murder whenever an opportunity presented itself? Might he have medicated himself into unconsciousness after setting the stage for a crash? If he chose to kill himself, why did he choose to take 149 people down with him? Did he choose at all?

Aviation has learnt, and learnt fast, from every catastrophe. Having spent so much time perfecting the machinery of flight safety, perhaps it is time for the industry to pay closer attention to the most unpredictable, and, therefore, potentially most dangerous, factor in a flight: the human factor. Perhaps they're already doing all they can to ensure the physical and psychological health of flight crew, ground staff and ATC personnel. But perhaps, too, there is scope for improvement.

It is probably easier to parse that grim mountainside for 150 devastated bodies than it is to parse the workings of a troubled mind. In the aftermath of the Germanwings crash, all we can do is rebuild the story, and try to make sure it never has to be told again. It's the only way to redeem the unfathomable grief of the families now gathered in France to begin the process of coming to terms with their loss.