Today we all feel a little less safe

Now it has emerged that the German airliner which crashed in the Alps was directed to its doom by the deliberate actions of the co-pilot, every airline passenger in the world ( and that's over a million people a day, every day) will have felt an awful chill running through their bones. For myself this feeling is mixed with a great sense of rage at that man's callous disregard, not only for his own life but for the 150 other souls aboard that fateful day. I'd almost feel better if it was some sort of terrorist outrage; almost any other explanation is preferable to the thought that someone wanted to die and didn't mind how many people he took with him.


The desire to take someone with you when you commit suicide is a well recognised phenomenon. Police know to be very cautious when approaching potential jumpers from high places. They know some of them like to drag someone else with them on their final journey. Perhaps it makes them feel better in their enterprise to know someone else is joining them on their final journey. I don't know, but I do know that what we saw earlier this week represented the most astonishing level of selfishness: quite literally, how could he do that?


There are a number of precedents for pilots committing "suicide by airliner"- a couple in America in the last twenty years, an Egyptair flight when the facts were vehemently denied by both the pilot's family and the entire Egyptian establishment, which came together to reject any possibility that the impossible had actually taken place, although an exhaustive investigation by the American NTSB found there could have been no other explanation. Here the reasons have emerged very quickly, so quickly in fact that I find myself wondering whether that is really the right answer, though perhaps that is just my mind refusing to accept such a terrible thing- a bit like the Egyptians I mentioned above in fact. But unlike them, I am prepared to listen to the evidence and accept the truth if that evidence is convincing.


All that remains is for everyone to take a deep breath the next time they climb aboard a plane and hope that everyone on board wants to land safely at their destination as much as they do. Stay lucky, people...