A new kind of terror in the skies

This is what everybody was saying on Thursday morning about the German co-pilot who killed himself and 149 other people on an airplane over the French Alps as surely as he had blown that plane up with a bomb or shot it out of the sky with a missile: They were saying that he was on no terror lists, even as Andreas Lubitz now becomes as much a face of terror as the masked men of ISIS, now that Lubitz’s suicide mission is officially an act of mass murder.

It is also an act of terror, even if it had nothing to do with politics or religion. It is our terror, yours and mine, now that the other side of the cockpit door is still not safe from a madman, all this time after Sept. 11.

This time terror, the idea in the modern world that we are not safe anywhere, is an Airbus A320 that has just reached its cruising altitude on its way from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, Germany. Lubitz, who has locked the pilot out of the cockpit, proceeds to fly his plane into the mountains the way the men of Sept. 11 flew planes into our buildings.

We know what happens when a madman with guns walks into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut or a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., or right up to a United States congresswoman on a Saturday morning in Arizona; when another sick person with a gun goes walking across a college campus. They kill as many as they can until once again the real gun control in America becomes another shooter taking himself out with a bullet to the head.

Andreas Lubitz kills himself and 149 more by taking his plane down while the captain he has locked out bangs on the cockpit door, right before all the innocents on that plane begin to scream. The only quiet place in the plane in those last moments, for all of them, is on the other side of the cockpit door.

My friend Parks Adams, a Navy pilot and a commercial pilot for almost all of his adult life, put it this way on Thursday morning:

“There’s so many things we can’t protect ourselves from in this world, we all know that. But all this time after 9/11, we still can’t protect ourselves from the guy in the damn cockpit.”

After all the safeguards put into the airline business after the worst day we have ever had in this country, mass murderers coming out of the sky the way they did, this Lubitz kills the way he did because he is protected by a locked door that was supposed to protect pilots from bad men such as him.

It doesn’t matter to those who died and those they left behind whether this was politics or some cockeyed version of God or Allah or eternity or depression or Lubitz’s “burnout syndrome.” Once again a terrorist was at the controls of a commercial airline, this time over France.

Parks Adams flew P-3s for 10 years in the Navy, sometimes on missions that lasted as long as 12 hours. He flew surveillance over the North Atlantic and over the Mediterranean and when he came home as a Navy captain, he flew commercial jets for 34 years, first for Eastern Airlines and then for US Airways before retiring a year and a half ago. So he flew for his country, and then for all those who ever put their lives into his hands.

“First,” he said, “I grieve for the people who lost their lives and for their families the way the whole world does. And then I get angry that someone in my profession could do something like this. We train so hard and so long to fly these planes, do everything within our power to use everything we’ve been taught about keeping our passengers safe. That’s the job: We use our training, we follow all the proper procedures and protocols, we keep the plane out of trouble and in the sky.”

He paused and said, “Pilots don’t kill people. They keep them alive.”

No masks this time, like the masks the murderers of ISIS wear every time they kill another innocent person for show and for sport, like posing for Instagram. We have a name this time. We have a face. We have learned more of this co-pilot’s story, about his depression and his current engagement, and will find out as much about him as we can find out. This isn’t Jihadi John, killing one at a time. Lubitz kills 150, including himself, in that eight-minute descent into the Alps.

No boastful words from him. Just the deathly silence of the cockpit, the breathing from him before he crashes his plane and kills all those people instead of keeping that plane in the sky, and keeping them alive. This time terror was back at the front of the plane.