A Lufthansa plane with 199 passengers onboard flew for 10 minutes without anyone in control of the aircraft after one of the pilots suffered a “sudden and severe” incapacitation while the Captain was taking a toilet break.
Full details of the hair-raising incident have now come to light after Spanish aviation accident investigators published their final report into what occurred aboard Lufthansa flight LH1140 on February 17, 2024.
Investigators have now made an urgent recommendation imploring airlines to have at least two people in the cockpit at any one time after it was revealed that the First Officer suffered a seizure and started to push buttons and make inputs on the controls uncontrollably.
Data extracted from the airplane’s black boxes show that no one was in control of the Airbus A321 for around 10 minutes as the Captain desperately tried to regain access to the cockpit, and air traffic controllers became increasingly concerned.
The incident occurred at around 10:30 am on February 17, 2024, as Flight 1140 was flying from Frankfurt to Seville. As the plane was over mainland Spain, the Captain decided to leave the cockpit for a short toilet break, leaving the First Officer alone in on the flight deck,
The Captain told investigators that the co-pilot seemed fine when he left the cockpit, but just 30 seconds later, the 38-year-old First Officer suffered a “sudden and severe” seizure caused by a previously undiagnosed heart condition that had not been picked up in mandatory aviation medical examinations.
What happened next isn’t entirely clear as the First Officer only remembers the Captain leaving the cockpit and then being tended to by cabin crew and an off-duty doctor in the forward galley for the plane.
The black boxes, however, reveal that the First Officer made a number of inputs on the controls, causing the ‘master caution’ alarm to sound in the flight deck.
Around seven minutes after leaving the cockpit, the Captain attempted to gain reentry by pressing the standard entry code on a keypad next to the cockpit door.
The entry code does not automatically open the door but only signals to whoever is on the flight deck that someone is trying to gain entry. The request to open the reinforced bulletproof cockpit door went unanswered, but, at first, the Captain thought he had accidentally entered the wrong code.
The Captain tried a second and then a third time without any success. A member of the cabin crew called the flight deck via an interphone, but this call went unanswered.
Desperate to regain entry, the Captain then entered an emergency code into the keypad. Again, this code doesn’t automatically unlock the door immediately but signals to anyone in the flight deck that the emergency code has been entered.
That person can then unlock the door or deny entry. If, after a set number of seconds, the person in the cockpit hasn’t unlocked the door or denied entry, the door automatically unlocks for a couple of seconds.
Before the timer ran out, however, the First Officer manually opened the cockpit door. By this point, he was pale, sweating, and moving strangely, so cabin crew rushed to get him out for the flight deck and started to provide First Aid.
The Captain quickly resumed control of the plane and requested an emergency medical diversion to Madrid Barajas Airport where the First Officer was rushed to a local hospital but discharged a few hours later.
In the aftermath of the horrifying crash of Eurowings flight 9525 in March 2015, which killed all 150 people onboard, European air safety regulators had called on airlines to always have two people in the cockpit at any one time.
In that incident, the First Officer waited for the Captain to leave the flight deck to use the toilet and then took control of the plane in a horrendous case of murder-suicide, crashing the plane in the French Alps.
Lufthansa initially followed the safety recommendations but several years later decided to relax its rules. Many other airlines across Europe had been vehemently opposed to the safety recommendation and never brought in the ‘two on the flight deck’ rule.
The Comisión de Investigación de Accidentes, however, is now urging airlines to reconsider their risk assessments.
In the U.S., under FAA regulations, when a pilot needs a bathroom break one of the flight attendants stays in the cockpit.
Eurowings flight 9525 in March 2015….not 2025.