lavatory. now i m going to commit this atrocity. it s interesting, david and richard, because in the egypt air crash, the pilot was able to regain access to the cockpit. this was before the changes were made to fortify the cockpit door and ended up wrestling with the co-pilot over the controls, still was not able to bring the aircraft back because the co-pilot turned the engines off. that was the determination and shows how difficult it is. he got back in. he got into the seat. and he still wasn t able to. you wonder how difficult this is. this wasn t suicide but let s just take air france 447, the captain comes back in again and he still can t. you ve got three pilots all trying to rescue an aircraft. where they ve got the same goal. and they still can t. so now imagine if you re trying to rescue an aircraft, where the other person is destined to doom the plane and shows you the sort of magnitude of the task.
like this and psychological screening will have to be looked at as well as technology solutions. changes to the airplane. cockpit and lavatory configurations are possibilities and technology solutions that have been discussed to possibly take over when the pilots are either incapacitated or intend to do bad things. should also be on the table. let s look at the mental health right off the bat. that is something that is shocking to people. we know they have a yearly physical. shouldn t this be part of the yearly physical. these people are trusted with the lives of hundreds of people. well in the past the primary focus on system safety has been on airplanes and training for pilots to make sure they do the right thing with respect to accidental causes. after 9/11 you would have thought that the aviation industry would have taken a similar system safety approach. so what s the problem. for security.
cockpit, the first thing he says is do you have the airplane? are you set? you are ready to go? we have to put on oxygen masks above a certain altitude. we leave the cockpit to do what it is to do. go get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom or lavatory and we come back and say we identify ourselves. the individual who opens the cockpit door looks through the viewing port to verify the crew member and open the door. there are other security procedures i cannot get into. that s what we would be doing. it would be a typical situation that we would partiescipate in. it is a basic non event. this is something that happens every day on flights hundreds of thousands of flights. routine to leave the cockpit.
head of the tsa. he helped lead the investigation into the egypt air flight flight 990 crash that was also believed to have been deliberate a deliberate act by pilot. thanks for joining us. when you were at the fbi before you went to the tsa, you oversaw the investigation of the egypt air flight 990 crash. remind us what happened in that instance. wolf, awes many of your viewers recall egypt air 990 took off from jfk to cairo. after takeoff and rising to cruising altitude the pilot, similar to this situation, got up to go to the lavatory and then the co-pilot locked the door and then put the plane into a steeper dive. the pilot actually realized what was going on came out and was able to get back in the cockpit, because we didn t have the reinforced doors back then
nefarious. however, the armored door isn t the only way to break into a cockpit. i ve spoken to several major airline mechanics. they explain to me the entire bulkhead leading to the cockpit, inclouding the front lavatory wall that s common to the lavatory and the cockpit, there is no armor there. that can be pierced. and that is a security risk. but the co-pilot trying to smash that armor down would have been better trying to cut through the bulkhead. that would have been possible. we ll have to break it there. coming up the saudi royal air force launched strikes in yemen tonight in an attempt to defend the president of yemen from takeover by the rebels. in the country. we operate just like a city and that takes a lot of energy. we use natural gas throughout the airport - for heating the entire terminal generating electricity on-site