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Could a Pilot Be Locked Out of a Cockpit in the Skies Over the United States?

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday morning, Germanwings flight 9525, en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, crashed in the remote southern French Alps. All 150 passengers and crew are presumed dead. Thanks to the quick recovery of one of the plane’s flight recorders, some details of the final moments of the flight are now known: one of the pilots was banging on the cockpit door, presumably locked out, while the second pilot—identified as German Andreas Lubitz—was in the cockpit breathing normally. On Thursday morning, Carsten Spohr, chief executive of Germanwings’s parent company Lufthansa, told reporters, “We must presume that the plane was deliberately flown into the ground.”

Federal Aviation Administration regulations require that two people must be in the cockpit at all times in order to prevent these sorts of incidents on flights to, from, and within the United States. And the FAA requires cockpit doors to be locked at all times. If one of the two pilots leaves the cockpit, a flight attendant must take his or her place for the duration of the break. Glen Winn, an aviation instructor at the University of Southern California, told the Los Angeles Times that “procedurally, something was very wrong.” Pilots “don’t leave a person alone in the cockpit,” he continued. “They don’t do it. Nobody does that.”

But there are no European regulations that require all flights to have two crew members in the cockpit at all times.* Some European airlines have adhered to the two-person policy, and some have not. German carriers are not required to keep two crew members in the cockpit. After the Germanwings crash, Easy Jet, a British carrier, and Norwegian Airlines announced they would implement the two-person rule.

On an Airbus 320, the plane used by flight 9525, a pilot can reenter a locked cockpit door by punching in a multi-digit code on a keypad. But someone inside the cockpit can temporarily disengage the keypad, keeping the door locked and barring entry to the cockpit for five minutes.

It’s unclear whether the Germanwings pilot who was trying to return to the cockpit attempted to use the keypad. But Spohr said that each member of the flight crew knew the code and that there would be no way a pilot could forget it. He suggested that the pilot may not have tried the code for some reason, or that Lubitz disengaged the keypad or found another way to block the door.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, new flight safety standards were established and cockpit doors were strengthened to resist intrusions, gunfire, and grenade blasts. So if the keypad is disabled there’s little anyone can do to break in for five minutes; brute force will not open the door.

If existing regulations and procedures are followed, a pilot of an airliner in US should not be locked out. But this tragedy certainly will prompt regulators and safety experts in the United States and abroad to review existing rules.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that European regulations also require two people in the cockpit at all times.

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Could a Pilot Be Locked Out of a Cockpit in the Skies Over the United States?

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Musician Jenny Lewis on "Sipping the Kool-Aid" of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos

Mother Jones

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Jenny Lewis, the musician best-known for fronting Rilo Kiley and singing in the Postal Service, has a packed schedule at the Governors Ball Music Festival in New York City, but she never gives off the impression that she’s in a rush. She homes in on every person she’s introduced to with genuine enthusiasm. Lewis is tiny, with long red hair, a mega-watt smile, and a tie-dyed blazer inspired by, “Cosmos, man!”—the television show beloved by geeks that helped inspire her new solo album, The Voyager, out on July 29 (stream it here.)

The Voyager is a frank examination of womanhood, buried under a layer of sugary alt-pop. Lewis is largely known for her songwriting, often about relationships, and this record is no different: She covers topics like late bloomers, “When I turned 16, I was furious and restless,” troubled romances, “I told you I cheated and you punched through the drywall,” and marriage, “I could love you forever. I could love you until all the Polaroids fade.”

Lewis’s music video for the album’s first single, “Just One of the Guys,” is a star-studded affair, featuring her friends Anne Hathaway and Kristen Stewart all dolled up—but as men. The song is a partly a meditation on ticking clocks (“When I look at myself, all I can see/I’m just another lady without a baby.”) Lewis tells me her lyrics speak for themselves and there is, “that lady pressure, as you called it, that is just biological in some ways.” She adds that, “Despite hanging out with dudes for my entire life and trying to fit in, ultimately, I’m a woman, and I’m becoming more comfortable with that the older I get.” She adds, “I’ve fought to be where I am today, and I’m absolutely a feminist.”

Lewis wrote the album, her first solo record since 2008, while struggling with a two-year bout of insomnia that she says almost took her out of the game. “I became an asshole,” she jokes. While sleepless nights didn’t really help her creativity, they did prompt her to watch a lot of late-night boxing and Cosmos, the television series by Carl Sagan, which became inspiration for her album. “I would watch that over and over and some that imagery really made it into the songs,” she says. Which isn’t to say that the title track is “a science fiction song.” Instead, it’s more about personal voyages. As she sings, “Nothing lasts forever when you travel time/ I’ve been sipping that Kool-Aid of the cosmos.”

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Musician Jenny Lewis on "Sipping the Kool-Aid" of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos

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Gallup Confirms Further Fall in Uninsurance Rate

Mother Jones

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The latest Gallup poll on the uninsured is out, and it shows that the uninsurance rate continues to drop. Using the same 2011-12 baseline I’ve used before, uninsurance has now dropped about 1.8 percentage points since the rollout of Obamacare. Since the Gallup poll includes everyone, not just the nonelderly, this amounts to about 5.6 million people. However, note that this 5.6 million drop doesn’t include sub-26ers who are on their parents’ insurance, since that policy change had already taken effect by 2011. Nor does it include the entire late surge in Obamacare enrollment. Add those in and the real number is probably in the neighborhood of 8-9 million. By the end of the year, we should hit 10 million or so.

The biggest declines in uninsurance were among the young, among blacks, and among the low-income. More details at the link.

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Gallup Confirms Further Fall in Uninsurance Rate

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