In a quiet town in the Rhineland this week the community is in shock. Their memories of Andreas Lubitz; the pilot who put his plane into fatal descent are good ones. An ordinary man, friendly, kind. Essentially a man who looked happy. Normally a town where not a lot happens suddenly the world’s media has descended. The world is demanding answers, the families who’ve lost loved ones are demanding answers in the midst of their grief.
The police have found ‘significant clues’ suggesting the pilot suffered a psychological illness – maybe depression, bi polar, schizophrenia. If this is the case there will certainly be a major overhaul of regulations, training, health checks, testing and so on within every airline company to screen a person’s mental state more thoroughly and adequately. But how can we know for sure. He looked happy! Most people suffering from mental illness look happy in photos, smiling faces to their friends, the shell of the person they really are because they have to learn to cope, to get on with life and develop coping mechanisms. But fundamentally I think that people with mental psychosis, conditions such as bi polar shouldn’t really be in positions which could potentially be of threat to the lives of others. But maybe if someone did want to take the lives of others as well as their own they will always go to great extremes to cover their tracks, conceal what is really going on inside their head in the same way that Harold Shipman did years ago. But inevitably people do leave tracks, footprints that lead us to conclusions and hopefully these will be found so that we can move forward.