AIR passengers’ safety has become the biggest concern in the recent past and the crash of Germanwings AirBus-320 killing all 150 persons on board including the crews came as a fresh reminder to look at human factors that often stand behind the crash. The disclosure that the co-pilot has caused the crash intentionally taking advantage of the pilot’s absence from the cockpit has stunned the people all over the world while the Lufthansa management, which operates Germanwings, said they are speechless how to describe the crash intentionally caused by its own co-pilot. As the report said the pilot’s brief absence from the cockpit is not anything exceptional. But why the co-pilot refused his re-entry to the cabin and abruptly switched the autopilot from a cruising height of 38,000 feet down to 100 feet to make the crash happen is the biggest question. The plane was flying to Dusseldorf in Germany from Barcelona in Spain and crashed in France Alps. What is hunting everybody’s mind now is why the co-pilot has done it; if he had any misunderstanding or bitterness with the captain minutes before. Lufthansa has meanwhile, ruled out any terrorist link with the young German born co-pilot. They have also ruled out the suicide theory that does not require killing as many people to kill himself. But the fact is that he has killed himself and all the 149 remaining people on board and there is no doubt that a big human factor, may be a highly emotional factor has worked behind his cruel decision to let the plane crash. Its reasons must be identified and steps must be taken to stop the recurrence of such accident in future. In parallel to this human factor, we may also refer here to the fact that the Air Asia crash in December last year in the Java Sea, that killed 162 persons on board on way to Singapore, was widely blamed to poor travel judgment of the pilot. He reportedly did not collect weather report and got caught up in a storm immediately after the take off to crash in the sea. The missing of the Malaysian Air Bus from March 2014 with 239 persons on board is also widely blamed to a tussle between the pilot and co-pilot on way to Beijing. These are some disclosures, which made the fact clear that the danger to passenger’s safety now growing more from human factors in running the flights rather to mechanical factors. The priority for the International Civil Aviation Authority must go now how to make sure that pilots are in good mental health and their working relations during flight time is also cooperative. The airline management must also make sure the strict compliance of operational code during the flight time because a slight mistake may end up in a bigger disaster in the air.
