( CNN ) It is now generally accepted that Germanwings first officer Andreas Lubitz did indeed lock his captain out of the cockpit , put their airplane into a steep descent , and then sit back and wait calmly for the end to arrive . He did it with premeditation , having discarded a doctor 's note that would have excused him from work that day . He joins the short and infamous list of airline pilots , a handful over the past two decades , who have used their airplanes to combine suicide with mass murder . Why is this thought at once so fascinating and so horrifying ? It is because of the incompatibility between what we want to believe about flying and what we now see . Air travel presents itself as a highly controlled , stringently professional activity , stripped of every unpredictable element . Flight crews wear military-style uniforms not because they could not fly equally well in street clothes , but because uniforms convey to passengers a subliminal suggestion that they are of a different breed , as far from ordinary folk as a world-class athlete is from a duffer . Not only are pilots smarter and better-trained than ordinary people , those stripes and caps say , but they also must be less forgetful than we , less distractible , better rested , not prone to irritability or sadness or smoldering resentments . Like soldiers , they must be just a little bit robotic , efficient , brave and purified of the trash that infests the souls of common humans . Because they have earned their stripes , we feel safe -- even when it seems impossible for us to understand , or apparently for anyone to explain , what keeps those huge metal contraptions up in the air . The truth , as the voluminous history of airplane accidents reveals , is that pilots are not different from other people . They can be careless , lazy , inattentive and reckless . They can drink too much . When pilots talk among themselves , the mistakes , the close calls , the disasters averted by sheer luck are favorite topics . But if pilots slip up in little ways from time to time , the sweeping drama of aviation , in which they are the actors and we the audience , eclipses their faults . Besides , most flying is routine -- hours of boredom , the cliché goes , punctuated by moments of sheer terror . The glitches have long since been ironed out , and the airplanes are so wonderfully engineered that they usually protect even the worst pilot from himself . Nor are pilots of a higher moral type than the rest of us . Despite the pieties they occasionally utter , pilots do not consciously shoulder the burden of hundreds of lives or feel more responsible for a full airplane than for an empty one . Pilots , by and large , are proud . They identify with the airplane ; it is an extension and enlargement of the self , and the pilot feels the same motive to deliver it safely to its destination as you feel when driving a car on a crowded freeway . A pilot values a smooth landing because it demonstrates skill , not because the people in back are still alive . The greatest guarantee you have that your pilot is devoted to your safety is the fact that he or she is in the airplane with you . So we should not be overly astonished if from time to time a pilot does something completely incompatible with our confidence . Pilots are drawn from the diverse pool of human types . The human mind is the blackest of boxes ; no one , neither colleague nor psychologist , can reliably peer inside it . Desperate , cataclysmic acts occur almost daily all over the world ; why should they not occur , once in a long while , in cockpits ? Perhaps , with time , we will understand better who Andreas Lubitz was and what he did . Today , we still know very little .
Experts suspect first officer stole a locked pilot out of the cockpit of helicopters . chapter 2 : Pilots do n't exist on different moral grounds than the rest of us , and the human eye is the blackest of boxes .