Air Safety and Cockpit Protocol

During a press conference earlier today, French officials said that Tuesday’s crash of the Germanwing Airbus was deliberately caused by the plane’s co-pilot, a 28-year-old German man named Andreas Lubitz. According to voice recordings, in the minutes before the plane slammed into the Alps, Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit. Some of the many questions people are asking today include how something like this could technically happen and what the security protocols are for cockpits. We look at what rules are in place and how they might change in the wake of this accident.