Thursday, March 28, 2024

One Cause of Germanwings Crash Was Negligent Switch Design

germanwings

*WASHINGTON, D.C. — While the immediate cause of the crash of a Germanwings jetliner appears to be the criminal act of the co-pilot, plaintiffs’ attorneys seeking entities likely to be able to pay the huge resulting damages seem to be focusing on the carrier’s allegedly deficient cockpit-occupancy policy and/or its pilot screening, but it appears that negligence in the design of the 3-position cabin door lock switch of the A320 could make the French company Airbus Group liable.

To establish negligence, plaintiffs would have to show that the event was reasonable foreseeable, and that it could have been prevented easily without great cost or inconvenience in operation.

The first is very easy because incidents where one aviator deliberately crashed an airplane are well known.  Indeed, the U.S. rule requiring that one person can never be left alone in the cockpit is designed to prevent exactly what apparently happened over France.

Even if that rule had been followed by Germanwings – and Airbus was certainly on notice that this carrier and many of the other users of its planes did not follow it – it might not have prevented a determined co-pilot from taking over the plane if the pilot was outside the cockpit.

Although, under the American rule, a flight attendant must take the pilot’s place in the cockpit if he leaves, it is certainly reasonably foreseeable that a flight attendant – especially a small female one – would not be able to stop a typical much larger and stronger male co-pilot from crashing a plane one way or another.

The A320 is designed so that the crew can unlock the cockpit door from outside by entering a code on a pad nearby.  But a co-pilot alone in the cockpit can easily defeat any attempt to thwart his suicidal plans by pushing a switch in the cockpit to a third position which locks out the code-unlocking mechanism.

However, although there may be times when it is appropriate or even necessary for the pilot and co-pilot together to lock out or override the crew’s code-unlocking mechanism, there seems to be little purpose in permitting a solo occupant of the cockpit to do so all by himself.

Thus, if there were a simple and well-known mechanism to permit two aviators to jointly securely lock the cabin, but which would not let a single aviator do so on his own, it would appear that the A320 manufacturers would be negligent as a matter of law for deliberately choosing not to use it.

Fortunately, such a mechanism is well known, and is used in somewhat similar circumstances – to prevent one deranged individual from launching a nuclear or other deadly missile.         Launching a missile, it should be noted usually requires having two individuals take the same action almost simultaneously in such a way that one person could not do it by himself.

Typically, two or more senior officers on a nuclear submarine or land-based missile-launch facility must each turn a key at the same time to permit a launch to take place.

The same principle – and the same protection against a single rogue wrongdoer – could easily have been [and still be] incorporated into the A320 cockpit design, so that defeating the crew’s code-unlocking mechanism could be done only if two switches on opposite sides of the cockpit control panel were activated at the same time – something impossible for one person to do.

That’s the analysis under American law, and it appears that at least some of the cases will be tried in American courts.  On the other hand, many countries apply the same simple definition and analysis to determine if an entity was negligent because they could have easily prevented a tragedy.

John Banzhaf
John Banzhaf III

JOHN F. BANZHAF III, B.S.E.E., J.D., Sc.D. Professor of Public Interest Law George Washington University Law School, FAMRI Dr. William Cahan Distinguished Professor, Fellow, World Technology Network, Founder, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) 2000 H Street, NW Washington, DC 20052, USA (202) 994-7229 // (703) 527-8418 https://banzhaf.net/ @profbanzhaf

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