PILOTS AND MENTAL HEALTH

The incident on board a JetBlue flight several weeks ago still has people talking.

The plane’s captain apparently suffered some sort of mental breakdown, the cause of which has not yet been made public. Subsequently he was locked out of the cockpit by the first officer, and eventually was subdued by passengers after embarking on a prolonged and agitated rant. An off-duty captain took his position in the cockpit, and the jet landed safely.

This is not the first time an airline crewmember has suffered a breakdown while aloft. And it was, no doubt, a potentially serious incident.

The questions people are asking, however, aren’t necessarily the right ones. Is there an unseen crisis? How many pilots out there are ready to crack? Is the mental health of pilots being evaluated properly by airlines and government regulators?

Yesterday I was asked if perhaps pilots ought to be randomly drug tested to weed out those who might be taking antidepressant medications on the sly. That one got under my skin. Is there really a precedent for such a thing? Should we similarly test surgeons, policemen, and other professionals entrusted with our safety?

Instead, let’s calm down.

I’ll point out that airline pilots undergo medical evaluations twice yearly. A First Class FAA medical certificate must be issued by an FAA-certified physician. The checkup is not a psychological checkup per se, but the FAA doctor evaluates a pilot on numerous criteria, up to and including his or her mental health. Pilots can be grounded for any of hundreds of reasons, from heart trouble or diabetes to, yes, depression and anxiety. It can and does happen. In addition, new-hire pilots at some airlines must undergo psychological examinations prior to being hired. On top of that, we are subject to random testing for narcotics and alcohol.

I’m uncertain what more we should want or expect. Pilots are human beings, and no profession is bulletproof against every human weakness. All the medical testing in the world, meanwhile, isn’t going to preclude every potential breakdown. What happened on that airplane could have happened in a taxicab, in an operating room, or on the flight deck of a NASA Space Shuttle for that matter.

As I mentioned earlier, this was not the first instance of a crewmember losing his composure — or worse. In 1994, an off-duty FedEx pilot, riding along in a cockpit jumpseat, attacked the crew of a DC-10 freighter with a hammer and spear gun. An Air Canada pilot was recently hospitalized following a meltdown of sorts, and, most notorious of all, a suicidal first officer is believed to have brought down EgyptAir flight 990 flying from New York to Cairo in 1999. Cabin crewmembers, too, have earned their share of infamy. An American Airlines flight attendant was recently taken to a hospital after seizing the plane’s public address system and frightening passengers with a rant about 9/11 and security. And in 2010, JetBlue’s flight attendant Steven Slater made headlines after sliding off his job — literally, down the emergency escape chute on a JFK tarmac.

A pattern? A pathology? It’s doubtful. Bear in mind that around the world each day, some two million passengers fly safely aboard tens of thousands of commercial flights. Strange things occasionally happen, and not all of the safeguards in the world are going to ward off the occasional aberration. It’s also true that there are many more pilots and flight attendants in the air, aboard many more airplanes, than there used to be. And the media, for its part, tends to seize on certain stories that, in years past, would have garnered less attention.

Are the stresses of airline life a factor? Airline employees work in pressure-prone environments, and those pressures have increased in recent years, exacerbated by cuts in salaries and benefits, numerous airline bankruptcies, and so on. And in the back of every airline employee’s mind is a permanent, gnawing uncertainty about job security and the industry’s future. But while it’s tempting, I’m hesitant to make a connection — especially with respect to pilots, who are highly trained, highly skilled, and who almost always take immense pride in their jobs, and their ability to perform at a high level even when under great pressure. At best, the effects of on-the-job stress are impossible to quantify.

Some in the media also have suggested that pilots are apt to conceal mental health problems out of fear of finding themselves grounded. This may have been true at one time, but things have come a long way. The FAA now permits pilots to fly while taking certain antidepressant medications (albeit after a waiting period and in accordance with strict guidelines), while airlines, for their part, have become more proactive and accommodating towards workers who admit to having problems.

As a point of comparison, consider the success of the HIMS program, a substance abuse intervention and treatment program put together several years ago by the FAA and the Air Line Pilots Association. HIMS has treated more than 4,000 pilots, with only 10-12 percent of participants suffering relapse. It has kept alcohol out of the cockpit, and has helped prevent the issue from being driven underground, where it’s more likely to be a safety issue.

Regardless of the cause, what happened the other day on JetBlue 191 should be seen for what it likely was: a serious incident, but an extraordinarily rare one that is not indicative of some underlying crisis or pathology among pilot ranks.

And difficult as it may be under the spell of a media frenzy that has mocked and vilified the poor man — i.e. “This is Your Captain Freaking” — let’s try as we can to feel sympathy for the unfortunate JetBlue airman. There’s no excuse for scaring the daylights out of passengers, but none of us knows for certain why he did what he did, or what he may have been dealing with.

Lastly, a technical note:

Passengers should understand that there are always two fully qualified pilots in the cockpit. The copilot (first officer) is not an apprentice. He or she is certified to operate the aircraft in all regimes of flight. Copilots perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do, and either pilot can safely handle the aircraft should the other become for any reason incapacitated. That an off-duty captain was called to the cockpit to assist with the landing of flight 191 does not imply the passengers would have been in danger without him. It would have been foolish not to take advantage of his presence. But the copilot, had he been alone, would easily have landed the aircraft.

Note: a version of the article below also appears on Salon.com, here.

Another deadly plot taken down in the planning stages. This time, tanks to the work of a CIA double agent, officials were able to infiltrate a Yemen-based al-Qaeda plot to destroy a US-bound jetliner using a nearly undetectable underwear bomb.

The moral of the story: Airport security works!

Am I being facetious? Not necessarily. It depends on your definition of airport security.

In my mind, the key to keeping terrorists away from airplanes is, and always has been, stopping acts of sabotage in the planning stages. Here in the age of the TSA checkpoint, with its toothpaste confiscations and wasteful obsession with pointy-objects, we tend not to think this way, preoccupied instead with a kind of airport Kabuki — the tedious, fanatical screening of passengers and their carry-ons. Real airport security takes place backstage, as it were. It is the job of the folks at the CIA and the FBI, working together with foreign authorities. And while TSA has a important role here too, we can do without the spectacle of airport guards rifling through innocent people’s bags in a pathological hunt for what are effectively harmless items.

The concourse checkpoint needs to be there. Just the same, however, chances are good that once an adversary has made it this far, he or she has engineered a way to outwit the system. And spend as we might, there will always be a way to outwit the system. “Even if our technology is good enough to spot it,” said California Congressman Adam Schiff, commenting on the news of latest underwear plot, “technology is still in human hands and we are inherently fallible.” That’s one of the smartest things I’ve heard a politician utter in some time.

Getting a handle on this takes us all the way back to September 11th, 2001 — the day that everything, and yet really nothing, changed. Conventional wisdom holds that the 19 hijackers exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling boxcutters onto four Boeing jetliners. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold. (In years prior, a hijacking meant a diversion, perhaps to Havana or Beirut, with hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were accordingly trained in the concept of “passive resistance.”) The presence of boxcutters on 9/11 was merely incidental. The men could used anything, particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The success of their plan relied not on hardware but on the element of surprise. It wasn’t a failure of airport security that allowed those men to hatch their takeover scheme. It was a failure of national security.

To put it succinctly: the success of the 9/11 attacks had almost nothing to do with airport security at all — a great and painful irony, of course, to any passenger forced to endure the standard checkpoint rigmarole in 2012.

Not that front-line guards don’t play a deterrent role. And in the opinions of some, the plot uncovered in Yemen underscores the value of full-body scanners — those controversial walk-through machines that allow guards to look beneath a passenger’s clothing. It’s a compelling argument, but the way in which these scanners have — and have not — been deployed is apt to make some of us cynical. For instance, the vast majority of body scanners are found at US domestic airports. Overseas, where a bomb is far likelier to originate, they are rare. Is this really about safety, we wonder, or is it about the billions of dollars going into the coffers of the companies contracted to build these machines?

The scanners are effective, there’s no denying that. But to what end? Not long ago, the idea that passengers would be marched through body scanners and photographed naked before being allowed to board an airplane, would have seemed outrageous. Yet here we are. What might be next? We can turn airports into fortresses if we want (in some respects we’re well along that path), yet we’ll never be entirely safe. Airport screening alone, no matter how thorough, how expensive, and how technologically advanced, will never defeat a relentless enough, resourceful enough adversary intent on downing a plane.

That isn’t capitulation, it’s reality. And acknowledging this reality would go a long way toward warding off panic and overreaction when the next successful attack occurs.

Regrettably, too, we often forget that commercial air travel has long been a target of terrorist extremists. The 1970s and 1980s in particular were, as I like to describe them, a Golden Age of Air Crimes, comparatively rife with bombings, hijackings and other deadly assaults against airplanes and airports. Over one five-year span between 1985 and 1989 alone, we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks, including the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people; and the incredible saga of TWA flight 847. And let’s not forget what might have been, such as the so-called “Project Bojinka,” the 1994 scheme organized by Ramzi Yousef (the nephew of Kalid Sheikh Mohammad), in which impossible-to-detect (at the time) liquid explosives were to be used to simultaneously destroy a dozen US airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately the plot unraveled and Yousef was arrested.

While we can argue, quite persuasively, that many of the current-day security measures have done little if anything to make us safer, we’ve nevertheless introduced measures that * have been * useful and effective, from explosives screening of checked luggage to the sorts of trans-border partnerships that broke up the most recent plot from Yemen. Whether in spite of, or because of, the attention we’ve lavished on All Things Terrorism, the past decade has seen fewer attacks against commercial air travel than any since the 1950s.

What we need to remember, though, is that our success has had more to do with the security measures we don’t see than those taking place in plain view. And if our luck is to hold, we need to better rationalize and streamline our entire approach to airport security. For instance, if we’re going to have those body scanners, let’s put them where they’re needed. If this requires negotiating with foreign authorities whose airports are beyond TSA’s jurisdiction, so be it. Meanwhile, here at home, TSA’s one-size-fits-all approach, in which every single person who flies is seen as a potential threat, is simply unsustainable in a country where close to two million people fly daily. Things like taking snow globes from children, haggling over tiny container sizes, or confiscating a dessert fork from a uniformed, on-duty airline pilot (it happened to me), serve no useful purpose whatsoever. On the contrary, they divert valuable time and resources away from the things that * could * make us safer. Let’s scale back that concourse Kabuki and retrain guards in the finer points of a more sensible, risk-based assessment of passengers and their belongings.

And lastly, if only as an aside: let’s behold for a moment the term, “underwear bomb.” That was the operative phrase in literally hundreds of articles and broadcasts over the past several days, and nowhere did it raise a snicker. What does it say about our country, I wonder, that such a preposterous expression is instantly understood and effectively taken for granted?

Strange times indeed.