Cockpit culture: Canadian pilot on the psychological demands of flying

As the investigation around the Gemanwings Flight 4U9525 tragedy unfurls, officials say the 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz allegedly locked out the captain and intentionally crashed the plane into the French Alps killing all 150 on board.  

Details have emerged that Lubitz may have hidden his mental illness and depression from his employer.

We sat down with Craig Daniels, a commercial pilot, former WestJet flight attendant and aviation journalist behind www.Bearing360.ca to learn about the dynamics in the cockpit and psychological testing in the aviation world.

Yahoo Canada News: You were in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania ferrying executives around on a private aircraft for a year before returning to Canada. You’ve likely had different co-pilots over the years but what the relationship like when you’re up there? How intimately do you know that person?

Craig Daniels: The co-pilot I had in Africa was the same guy on every trip. You get to know each other well, the habits, likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. With the big airlines like WestJet, every pairing – which is often a five day session of trips – you're paired with a new first officer virtually every trip. But every airline is very strict about the way they conduct what’s called Crew Resource Management, which is everybody is trained the same way – how to work with one another – they all know the rules and conditions intimately and there are procedures described for just about every eventuality.

YCN: Tell me a bit about those working dynamics when you’re up there? I know you have different tasks but it must be based on symbiosis.

CD: With airlines like Air Canada or WestJet, what happens is each day you fly a series of legs. The co-pilot and pilot will take turns – the captain and first officer – one guy is clearly in charge and the other is a subordinate. They are both equally qualified on the airplane and they’re both equally competent as pilots but one will just have more experience then the other.

YCN: In terms of flying hours you mean.

CD: The captain will have substantially more flight hours and in the event of a critical decision, the captain’s word is final. Years ago there was a culture in aviation where the captain was kind of the god and the co-pilot was very subservient, never allowed to touch the controls for months and months until the captain deemed that person had sufficient experience. But it set up a culture where the junior crewmember was intimidated and unwilling to question the decisions of the captain and how the flight was unfolding. Accidents would happen because one person was making a decision maybe based on being tired, being overworked, hung-over possibly, and there was no real check and balance on that individual. Now a good captain will set a tone and encourage feedback; work as a team and check with the other and correct mistakes and it makes for a safer ride.

YCN: How’s that differ from the culture in Europe or Asia?

CD: In Europe and Asia, flight training is very expensive and very difficult to do because there’s no airspace. It’s very difficult to find a place to do elementary flight training so what that does is drives up the cost of the training prohibitively. Airlines were finding in those regions, they weren’t getting enough crew so they had to come up with a way to train crew and to make it affordable for people. A lot set up internal training regiments where you would enlist a young would-be pilot very young and put them in your own training program right from the get-go. You would gain entry to a very sophisticated flight deck at a very early stage of your career. Some [were co-piloting] very big airplanes with as little as 250 hours.

YCN: What’s the standard?

CD: In the case of this accident that FO (first officer) had 630 hours. The captain had 6,000. The captain’s time was about right for that airplane but the FOs time was extraordinarily low by North American standards. It’s legal but in North America it’s very, very different. You wouldn’t gain access to a flight deck that sophisticated until you had something like 3,000 hours.

They threw a guy with 600 hours, which is relatively low, into a really sophisticated airplane. In this case, I don’t think that had any bearing on the accident and what happened except when you have a lot of hours under your belt, you have a proven track record. You’ve gone up and come down over and over gain. You’ve got a proven track record.

YCN: Is there mental or psychological testing for something such as depression?

CD: I don’t know of an airline that specifically and deliberately tests for depression and I mean what company really does? You can get depressed and walk into your place of work and kill people tomorrow but generally speaking it doesn’t happen. If something is off with a coworker you pick it up pretty quickly and there are ways to sort it out.

YCN: But you mentioned even being hung-over or having someone come in overtired, how do you deal with that when you’re flying a plane with them?

CD: Well good airlines are good about establishing the culture. WestJet certainly is one of them. Where you go through the hiring process and screening process you hire people who've proven they’re responsible and willing to be very self-critical and self-policing. For instance in the interview you’ll get questions like “tell me about a time when you made the wrong decision or a time when you didn’t take the advice of your first officer and you should of?” What they’re looking for is not people who are belligerent but people who have a willingness to listen and take the advice of someone else even if they’re the captain.

YCN: What happens if you have had drinks or are in a sketchy mental state?

CD: There’s prescribed rules from Transport Canada from when you’ve begin drinking to when you stop and can enter a flight deck and if you break those rules – sometimes by mistake like you’re in a different time zone and forget to set your clock – you’re encouraged to phone in and say you broke the rule, you can’t fly and the airline, rather than punishing you, will say, okay we'll get somebody else to. In a good airline that culture is very much in existence. If you wake up one day and say “I just haven’t got it today, I'm tired, overstressed because my kids, I had a fender bender on the way to work and I’m not in a good frame to be in the flight deck,” a good airline – like Air Canada or WestJet here – would say “thank you and no problem, head home and let us know when you’re good and in the meantime we'll get somebody else to fly your spot.”

YCN: So the real defense is to just make sure you don’t have those people? 

CD: The system is not perfect and now and again somebody will make a bad decision ­– and flying by the way is all about decision making – but the point is hiring people with thousands of hours who have proven they make good decision over and over again and that could be something as simple as asking “Am I fit enough to fly today?” No amount of testing and training can get it completely right. It looks like in this case they didn’t but how often does a pilot walk into a flight deck, lock the other guy out and fly the airplane into a mountain? It doesn’t happen very often.

YCN: I still keep coming back to what you said about how there’s no workplace that repeatedly tests mental wellbeing.

CD: And even if they do, what reliable test is there for a guy who goes in and decides he’s going to crash an airplane. I don’t know how you really screen for that.