Now that it is out in the open that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot who flew 150, including himself, to their deaths, had manifested strong suicidal tendencies before he got his pilot’s licence, there really is no room for manouevre. Suicidal tendencies in somebody so young – he would have been in his very early 20s at the time – never go away. They are completely different to the suicidal response of a middle-aged person to a real or perceived major life crisis. People in their early 20s haven’t really started grown-up life and if they are suicidal already, that points to a fundamental neurosis that is part of the person’s make-up. It might be a response to upbringing, it might be genetic, it might be part of both – but whatever the case, it’s there and people in that situation are never really going to get out of it. This is not run-of-the-mill depression we are talking about. Millions suffer from depression without becoming suicidal.

One newspaper, a few days after the disaster, ran a story saying that Lubitz took the plane down close to where he holidayed with his family as a child, or where he first became interested in gliders, or something like that. All sorts of things were read into that. But that’s what happens when stories are written in haste and meaning seen where there is only coincidence – you overlook the obvious. Lubitz took the plane down exactly in that not because the area had any special significance for him, but because that is when his captain left the cockpit and went to the lavatory. Lubitz had no way of knowing when that would be, or where the plane would be at the time. The only thing he can have planned is to take the plane down when the captain left the cockpit. He couldn’t have known where it would be.

And that’s a point which nobody seems to have brought up yet. At least, I have not read it anyway. Perhaps I missed the commentary. This was a catastrophe that would have been averted had the captain not felt nature’s call (though it would certainly have happened to another group of passengers on another flight, given that Lubitz seemed determined). Those people died in part because of a chance call of nature. But you can also look at it another way: that because the captain left the cockpit when the plane was flying over an uninhabited area, the only people who died were those on the plane. That is terrible enough. But how much greater would the disaster have been if those two minutes the captain was in the lavatory coincided with the plane flying over a large town or city? Lubitz’s state of mind, from what we can gather, would not have allowed him to feel any qualms about taking the plane down into a densely populated area. He might even have preferred it that way, as his sick mind would have seen that as infinitely more dramatic and worth the effort. You can see it two ways: that the captain’s decision to go to the lavatory at precisely that moment led to the deaths of 150 people, though he is in no way to blame. But at the same time, his decision to leave the cockpit exactly then probably spared a few thousand people in a town or city. I haven’t looked at the flight path, but it is practically impossible for a plane to fly between one European city and another without passing over several large towns or cities.

Has this shaken people’s trust in air travel and air safety? It’s hard to tell. Airports and flight bookings seem to be as busy as ever over Easter week, budget airlines included. What it has done, I think, is bring mental instability into sharp public focus in a way that moves some distance from recent efforts to portray mentally unstable people as essentially harmless except to themselves. I have always claimed that the fear people have of the mentally unstable is justified – quite obviously not in all cases and not as a generalisation, but then people who are not professionals in the field are unable to work out which people are dangerous and which are not (though some non-professionals can do so seemingly instinctively). So they err on the side of caution, and avoid people who are mentally ill altogether. Is this bad? Yes, it is bad for the individuals who are suffering, but in the light of experience it is hard to blame those who feel this way. We have just had a horrific example of what can happen when people don’t err on the side of caution and instead give the mentally ill the benefit of the doubt in a position of major responsibility for the lives of others.

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