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BBC reports the co-pilot of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the Alps intentionally locked the pilot out of the cabin and initiated the flight's descent into the ground:
The co-pilot of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps, named as Andreas Lubitz, appeared to want to "destroy the plane", officials said.
Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin, citing information from the "black box" voice recorder, said the co-pilot was alone in the cockpit.
He intentionally started a descent while the pilot was locked out.
Mr Robin said there was "absolute silence in the cockpit" as the pilot fought to re-enter it.
Air traffic controllers made repeated attempts to contact the aircraft, but to no avail, he said.
The story seems SN-worthy because it is an object lesson in the consequences for our lives when we put complex machines and systems into the hands of others. In this case it was a trained pilot who killed a plane full of people who were powerless to stop him. Another example could be engineers who sabotage a dam and wipe out entire communities downstream. We mostly don't think about stuff like this because there is an invisible web of trust, sometimes called a "social contract," that leads people to get on a plane, or go to work, or take their kids to school without giving it a second thought. But when that social contract unravels, all bets are off...
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday March 30 2015, @12:00AM
I sort of agree with you but reach the opposite conclusion. Before I get into the whole “mind control” thing which has been public science for a long time (religion is ancient and stuff like Pavlov's dog could also be said to be a kind of mind control):
- I haven't heard anything about monosyllables and wouldn't put any significance to it anyways; ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are perfectly cromulent words :P What I've read is that the murderer didn't say anything at all after locking the door from his seat.
- Yes no messages of any kind has been found it seems, only some medical papers deeming him unfit to fly that he had torn up. On its own not indicative of anything except he wanted to continue flying. Many people often tear up paper they're going to throw away, some shred (maculator/paper shredder) everything they throw away.
- The murderer used the autopilot, he could have taken manual control if he felt like it or wanted to. Autopilots don't seem much different to running scripts, basically all he did was to change a variable.
- The heart rate isn't recorded but the “voice recorder” is intentionally able to record even faint breathing in the cockpit. The voice recorder in this instance has recorded normal breathing from the murderer all the way until impact.
- If one is deliberately crashing then the last minutes is probably a bad time to get anything off one's chest unless one has some braindead slogan to chant. He might have just closed his eyes and waited. He could have changed the autopilot or taken manual control at any time and survived except for the last thirty seconds or so.
Modern individual “mind control” requires local equipment (I'm thinking of the stuff that has been published on transmitting internal voices using split signals etc. aka “voice of god”) or implants (receivers) or “old-fashioned” psychological subjugation (helped by violence, tricks/suggestion, or chemistry). The impression I have is that with a few possible exceptions it's all a bit touch and go and can be very sloppy and slow. I have no idea why so many people continue to believe “mind control” —individual or collective— to be impossible or outlandish.
It doesn't make any difference in this case; it holds no explanatory power and thus seems entirely irrelevant either way.
At first I was suspicious of the reported “calm” of the murderer but after a day or so I realized i was only trying to explain away the simple truth that it's not all that unusual nor impossible for someone to not show signs of agitation or stress even though they know they'll die. The description ‘cold-blooded’ isn't a new one (and is only a negative variation of ‘collected’, ‘calm’ etc.). So at least my opinion is that there's nothing suspicious about this disaster: very unusual but not at all suspicious.
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