Unruly passengers outnumber rogue pilots

The world’s reaction to rogue pilots fails to appreciate that unruly passenger incidents are a much bigger problem.

The world’s precipitous reaction to tragedies such as Germanwings flight 4U9525 and the so-called “two in the cockpit” rule that emerged fails to appreciate that there is a significantly higher risk of unruly passenger incidents than pilot suicide.

Australia’s iteration of the rule requires that two crew members always be present on the flight deck, including a cabin crew member if a pilot needs to leave for any reason.

The rule came about within six days of the Germanwings crash and subsequently has not been revised, notwithstanding the (then) minister’s promise of a formal review after 12 months.

Arguably, however, cabin crew have vital functions elsewhere on the aircraft.

There are more than 100,000 flights worldwide each day.

The International Air Transport Association reports that more than one in 1600 flights must deal with unruly passenger incidents and 20 per cent of these require crew intervention.

The number of possible or rumoured pilot suicides (in the history of commercial air transport) is 12 — 13 if one includes Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. You do the maths.

In reality the rule introduces a safety and security risk by forcing the frontline of safety (flight attendants) in the cabin to attend to a role never intended for them as the “keepers of malicious aviators”. Cabin crew members are not trained to deal with the contingency of a professional pilot gone rogue and the multitude of ways they may bring down a flight if they are determined to do so.

That fact means cabin crew members’ presence on the flight deck is at best a poor attempt at giving an appearance of public ­protection. There’s nothing wrong with a rule that gives the travelling public a feeling that something is being done to protect their safety. But when doing so compromises safety in other ways and is likely not supported by the individuals required to carry it out, that becomes a problem. The answer is not to train cabin crew to be better at this task.

What is needed is a more balanced regulatory response than shifting safety-sensitive personnel to where politicians think they are needed most.

This has been the way with all the major aviation security threats that have sounded in legislative policy including the steps taken to harden cockpit doors after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: the introduction of restrictions on carriage in cabins of liquids, aerosols and gels; the use of body scanners; and fortifying the legal powers of in-flight security officers under the 2014 Protocol to Amend the Convention on Offences and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft.

In all these instances, diligent policy work and consultation led to reasonable regulatory action.

That is not to say that flight attendants themselves may have some malicious intent nor that they cannot be trained to undertake the role the rule requires.

But should they be used as a pawn in the absence of a more considered regulatory response?

The numbers would suggest the risks are in the passenger cabin rather than on the flight deck and interfering with the numbers of qualified cabin crew able to deal with those at any one time may be a problem in itself.

Last week at the annual McGill/PEOPIL Aviation Liability and Insurance Conference in Edinburgh, other aviation legal experts and I considered the liability implications for airlines and their insurers of these and other safety risks that might result in litigation.

We will look at several cases but one common theme runs through them: regulators have responsibility for getting the rules right, but airlines and their insurers bear the legal risk of bad rules that contribute to disasters.

This now one-year-old rule presents a dormant imbalance the industry should not stand for.

Joseph Wheeler is aviation legal counsel to Maurice Blackburn Lawyers and the Australian Federation of Air Pilots.