From our Please No Conspiracy Theory series
Let's repeat: if you are looking for a conspiracy theory, please go somewhere else, maybe relax by going to All Things Disney.
Airplane disasters are not a typical topic of the K-Landnews. In fact, we wrote a single post about one disaster, the MH-370 incident. Our post Malaysia Airlines MH370 and the photo: Chicago Airport? only dealt with the initial speculation and hype and the focus on "unknown" passengers in the absence of any solid information.
Our high empathy newsroom staff pegged the Germanwings crash as "something wrong with the co-pilot" early on, and that was that.
On a purely technical level, the changes to the cockpit entry system after 911 allowing the door to be locked are cut and dry. The fact that the Germans did not have a two person rule is sad. No, a hundred pound flight attendant might not be able to subdue a male pilot or co-pilot but might at least have a chance to unlock the f****ing door.
So, 911 is out of the way, what about the Nazis?
More unintended consequences.
They put in place rules and regulations, some of which either survived the war unchanged or heavily influenced the choice of later rules. Stuff that survived unchanged includes, for example, the rule that former prison inmates cannot legally donate blood in Germany to this day. Germans also make their privileged career civil
servants undergo a strict physical with the stated aim to eliminate the
likelihood of early retirement for health reasons. This means that of
two desk jockeys doing the same job, one a regular government employee, the other a
"Beamter", the latter will undergo a physical, the former will not. Strangely enough, the early retirement rate of "Beamte" is higher than that of the other group.
Medical examinations of pilots, flight medicals, can be seen as an area where Germany went for the most restrictive rules out of a set of available rules.
It won't come as much of a surprise that most of the commercial airliners in use today in Western countries may be the same but the medical requirements for pilots may differ quite a bit. The differences are greatest for the class of private flying licenses, which are so diverse that you may be able to pass a flight medical with flying colors in one country and be prohibited from taking the controls in another. The blogster happens to know (Life #5 or so).
In Europe, there are the Joint Aviation Requirements (JAR) regulations covering
the whole of aviation that have been, or are being, implemented by the
European states of the Joint Aviation Authorities (JAA). Where there are more restrictive options within the various JARs, the Germans tend to go for the restrictive options.
In aviation, the strict medical rules were instituted mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, which may explain the longstanding German emphasis on vision: you needed to see your enemy, and it helped to be a bit crazy.
More seriously though, the Nazis were brutal to people with mental health problems and post WWII Germany saw "slow progress" in psychology and psychiatry.
Could it be that problems in dealing with mental health issues openly and in a non-judgmental manner might have played a role in the latest disaster?
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