Comment by MangoToupe
1 day ago
If you're focused on whether or not the pilot cares (or is even alive), you've lost the plot. The point is to keep passengers alive regardless of the pilot.
There's no real point to considering what happens if the pilot wants to murder people on board. Of course they will succeed....
The thing is, people always want something to be done. And politicians want to do something. No matter what kind of action it is, someone knifed a kid on the street, we must ban knives of a certain length. A pilot downs a plane while the other leaves the cockpit - we must mandate two pilots always present. Someone hides explosives in his shoe - we must X-ray all shoes of all passengers forever. Etc.
The human brain can't take the idea that yeah an exceedingly rare thing happened and we're not going to do anything, because rare things do happen sometimes. And the medicine can be worse than the disease. We just accept that yeah, despite best efforts, some pilots will be hostile for whatever mental reasons. Not saying that is what happened in this case, but just saying that IF that happened.
We need more tradeoff thinking, instead of do something! thinking.