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In the wake of the March 2015 Germanwings airline crash that apparently occurred when the co-pilot barricaded himself in the cockpit and deliberately sent the plane into a fatal dive into the French Alps, some speculative news accounts reported that banging sounds heard on the cockpit's voice recorder might have indicated the locked-out captain had resorted to trying to break down the cockpit door with an axe. That detail of the Germanwings tragedy prompted renewed interest in an apocryphal, decades-old urban legend about a locked-out pilot and a fire axe. Examples: [Collected on the Internet, 1999] The version of the legend quoted in the example block above was circulated on the Internet during the summer of 1999, and few readers had reason to doubt its truthfulness: it was a first-person account reported by travel writer Gaby Plattner in the Chicago Tribune, a respected print journalism outlet. But soon afterwards it became clear that, in true urban legend fashion, the article's author had reported as her own experience a story she'd merely heard from someone else, and none of the events she described had happened to, or been witnessed by, her. The following statement comes from the apology Gaby Plattner subsequently extended to Air Zimbabwe: When she was originally challenged about her article, Plattner's journalistic ethics remained non-existent. Randay Curwen, travel editor of the Chicago Tribune, said: After the story appeared and the first question was raised by a reader, she [Plattner] continued to claim the incident happened exactly as she had written. It was only after she was confronted with a very similar story in a book that she admitted the deception. Quite possibly that book was folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand's Curses! Broiled Again!, which had been published a full ten years prior to Plattner's account and included the following legend description: Air Zimbabwe failed to appreciate the attempt to breathe life into an old urban legend by dragging their name through the mud. It penned a strong letter of protest to the Chicago Tribune, decrying the article as totally untrue, unprofessional, and damaging: The airline instituted legal action against both the Chicago Tribune and Gaby Plattner because the article had caused serious damage to that country's tourism and the reputation of Air Zimbabwe. As for how old the legend of the locked-out pilot is, one of our oldest versions was contributed by an American Airlines pilot who remembered hearing it in 1978. Another reader, the former editor of a flying magazine, recalled hearing the story in 1968 when it was told of a hapless pilot of a G18 Twin Beech whose encounter with clear air turbulence left him on the wrong side of the closed cockpit door and who had to use a pocketknife to unscrew the hinges to get back in only seconds before the fuel tank in use completely drained. The story has been variously attributed to any number of airlines over the years; Air Zimbabwe was one prominent victim, but neither the first nor the last. Too much about this legend rang false at the time for it to be taken seriously by those inclined to believe it, at least back in the pre-9/11 days (after which many airline safety procedures were revamped). Spare keys to the flight deck were typically stashed in various locations around most airliners, obviating the notion that the pilot could be accidentally locked out — until subsequent security changes eliminated the use of such keys: Also, airline cockpit doors aren't spring-loaded to snap shut when released. (Indeed, by FAA rules, when the plane is on the ground that door remains open. Passengers will recall that the cockpit door is open while they boarding and deplaning without anyone's struggling to hold it open.) Fire axes, when they were carried, were often stowed within the cockpit itself, and most airlines still have a protocol in place holding that a flight attendant should step into the cockpit with the co-pilot if the pilot steps out (or vice-versa) so that no one is ever left alone on the flight deck. But all those safeguards were established back in the days when it was unanticipated that anyone (pilot or otherwise) would deliberately barricade himself inside a cockpit with the intent of crashing a plane. News accounts described an incident involving a pilot's being unable to re-enter the cockpit during a flight on 26 August 2006 when, after completing his bathroom break, the pilot of Air Canada Jazz Flight 8475 reportedly found himself unable to regain entry to the flight deck during the 2.5 hour flight between Ottawa and Winnipeg because the closed cockpit door had become stuck. It took approximately ten minutes for the crew to remove the door from its hinges and so return him to the controls. However, there was no report of a fire axe being used to chop through the door, and no point was the plane in danger. As per established procedure, the first officer remained on the flight deck throughout the pilot's absence; therefore, even if the pilot had remained locked out of the cockpit for the rest of the flight, the first officer was also fully qualified to land the aircraft and could have brought the plane down safely on his own.
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