By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--March 31, 2015
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The airline said that as part of its internal research it found emails that Andreas Lubitz sent to the Lufthansa flight school in Bremen when he resumed his training there after an interruption of several months. In them, he informed the school that he had suffered a "serious depressive episode," which had since subsided. The airline said Lubitz subsequently passed all medical checks and that it has provided the documents to prosecutors. It declined to make any further comment. The revelation that officials Lufthansa had been informed of Lubitz's psychological problems raises further questions about why he was allowed to become a pilot for its subsidiary, Germanwings, in September 2013. Authorities say the 27-year-old Lubitz, who in the past had been treated for suicidal tendencies, locked his captain out of the cockpit before deliberately crashing the Airbus 320 into a mountain in the French Alps on March 24. All 150 people aboard Flight 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf were killed.Now let me play devil's advocate on the company's behalf here. Would a history of depression automatically disqualify a person from working as a pilot? You say sure now, given what happened last week, but would that have been a natural assumption before the Germanwings crash? I'm sure there is some standard in the airline industry concerning the mental health of pilots, but it's quite possible that a history of problems is not an automatic disqualifer given a certain treatment regimen you might work out with your employer. A bigger problem, though, is the shifting of their story, as Shep and Judge Napolitano discuss here:
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