Could Better Tests Have Predicted the Rare Circumstances of the Germanwings Crash? Probably Not

The Conversation - In this opinion piece, Norman Paradis, professor of medicine at Geisel, discusses the Germanwings crash and the unlikelihood of discovering pilots at risk and taking steps to prevent similar events from ever occurring again. “There have been 660 million commercial airline departures since 1959, with only a handful of crashes believed to have been intentional acts by the pilot. Even if we assume there may have been crashes intentionally caused by pilots but not attributed to them, it is still a very rare event. Maybe not the rarest of events (at least one person among the approximately 100 billion people who have ever lived claims to have been both struck by lightning and bitten by a shark), but for our purposes it’s particularly unusual,” says Paradis. Read more...