Johannesburg - Airlines internationally rushed to introduce two-person cockpit rules after the Alps crash, but South Africa may not be among them.
Airlines started changing their rules to require a second crew member in the cockpit at all times, hours after French prosecutors suggested a co-pilot who barricaded himself alone at the controls of a jetliner had crashed it on purpose.
“South Africa is not reassessing our regulations in this area as a result of the preliminary statements extracted from the black box in the Germanwings crash,” said South African Civil Aviation Authority spokeswoman Phindiwe Gwebu this morning.
“At the moment, we believe it would be impulsive to change regulations based on preliminary reports.”
Gwebu said there were currently no regulations stipulating the minimum number of pilots that should be in the cockpit at any time. “The regulation states that the aircraft must never be left unattended.
“This means that at any given point in time, there must at least be one pilot in the cockpit.”
She said individual operators would dictate how many pilots should be in the cockpit at any given time in their company policies.
SAA would not say anything about its protocols.
“SAA has and will continue to apply strict security protocols across all our flights and aircraft,” said SAA spokesman Tlali Tlali this morning.
“Should the need arise, SAA will not hesitate to review these protocols.
“However, our first thoughts should be with the families, friends and colleagues of our peers who have suffered a tragic loss.”
Reuters reports that the US already requires two crew members to be in the cabin at all times, but many other countries do not, allowing a pilot to leave the flight deck, for example to use the toilet, as long as one pilot is at the controls.
That is precisely what French prosecutors suspect happened on the Germanwings flight on Tuesday.
They say Andreas Lubitz, 27, locked the captain out and appears to have set the controls to crash into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board.
Airlines including Norwegian Air Shuttle, Britain’s easyJet, Air Canada, Air New Zealand and Air Berlin all said within hours they had introduced a requirement that two crew members be in the cockpit at all times.
Among the companies that did not announce such a policy change was Germanwings parent Lufthansa, whose chief executive Carsten Spohr said he believed it was unnecessary.
“It was a one-off case. But we will look at it with the various experts at Lufthansa and the authorities.”
Australia’s Qantas Airways and Singapore Airlines said they have strict, multi-layered systems in place to protect the cockpit.
The incident is likely to provoke further debate about the future of cockpit protections. Since the September 11 attacks on the US, regulators have required cockpit doors to be impenetrable when locked from the inside.
But the idea that pilots themselves could be a danger creates reason to re-examine such policies, said retired French crash investigator Alain Bouillard.
“Today we have the reverse question: Should we be blocking doors?” he said
.
The Star