Several years ago, I was a first officer on a Boeing 737 on final approach into Cancún, Mexico, as a tropical storm developed over the coast. We had reviewed the weather carefully, and the aircraft ahead of us were landing. At around 900 ft, we flew into severe turbulence and lost visibility. The autopilot disconnected, and a wind shear warning followed. We reacted the way we had trained to react, calmly and methodically, and we went around.
Our planned alternate lay on the other side of the storm, and with the fuel we had, flying around the bad weather wasn’t an option. In a pilot’s mind, fuel equals time, and my mind was racing. Then I remembered Cozumel, an island airport I knew well from a previous job, away from the core of the storm. We landed without further incident. Some passengers chose to end their journey there. For us, the day wasn’t over: A few hours later, we flew back to Cancún and landed normally.
On the way home, I noticed the other pilot shifting in his seat and wiping his palms. When I asked, he admitted he was shaken and not sure he could fly the next leg. I told him he could stand down and the company would find a replacement. He shook his head. The company, he said, would never accept fear as a reason to be unfit to fly. He flew the last leg, but his mind was elsewhere the whole way.
In the months that followed, he never reported unfit for the real reason. When storms were forecast, he called in sick with stomach problems he didn’t have, or he simply didn’t show up. The anxiety, which at times materialized as a full-blown panic attack, made flying in bad weather impossible for him. I urged him more than once to get help, telling him the company or the union would understand. He never did. Afraid of retribution and of losing his license, he weathered that storm alone. Eventually he found blue skies again. But at what cost?
On March 24, 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525 left Barcelona, Spain, for Düsseldorf, Germany. It never arrived. The copilot deliberately flew the aircraft into the ground in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board.
The French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) found he had a history of mental illness. In 2008, he suffered a severe depressive episode, was treated; the following year, he was judged fully recovered, returned to his training, and went on to become an airline pilot. When he fell ill again in December 2014, he did not inform the airline. Several of the doctors he saw were private physicians with no link to the airline’s aeromedical center, so what they knew never reached Germanwings.
The BEA identified three factors behind his silence. The first was the illness itself, which had likely eroded his grip on reality. The other two will sound familiar to any pilot: the financial cost of losing his license, which his insurance would not cover, and the end of a career he had chosen out of passion, not just for a salary.
My colleague’s condition was far milder. The fears that kept him silent were the same.
Eight years after Germanwings, the pattern repeated. On Oct. 22, 2023, an off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot riding in the cockpit jump seat of a Horizon Air Embraer 175 carrying 83 people tried to pull both engine fire handles. Had he succeeded, both engines would have shut down in flight. The crew stopped him. He told police he believed he was having a nervous breakdown, had been depressed for months, had not slept in 40 hours, and had taken psychedelic mushrooms for the first time. Whatever role the drugs played, he had struggled for years without seeking help. He lost his certificates and his career. At his sentencing, the judge said healthcare avoidance among pilots needs to end. News reports quoted the pilot who helped get him out of the cockpit as saying, “You do not punish people into being more transparent in this culture.”
These are not isolated cases. In a 2022 survey of 3,765 U.S. pilots, Dr. William Hoffman and colleagues found that 56 percent of respondents had avoided healthcare for fear of losing their medical certificates, and more than a quarter had withheld or misrepresented information on medical questionnaires. The sample included military, corporate, and private pilots as well as airline crews, but the message is clear: Pilots are working around the very system meant to catch problems.
So why does the silence persist? Anyone familiar with aviation knows it is a stressful, demanding job. Aspiring pilots are told so from the start, so they know what they are getting into, and airlines screen us repeatedly to make sure we remain reliable under pressure. So, the usual answer is simple: It’s the job, and if you can’t handle it, don’t fly.
But routine stress is rarely what breaks a pilot. My colleague passed every screening and was a capable pilot until that one approach into Cancún. For others, it is life itself: a death, a divorce, debt, a legal battle. No selection process can screen for what hasn’t happened yet.
When it happens, pilots don’t stop coping. They find ways around a system that may punish their honesty: faking an illness, as my colleague did, or quietly using every absence their employer allows. Many airlines can now spot these “strategic” sick days. What they cannot see is the reason behind them, and a problem nobody can see is a problem nobody can fix.
The peer support programs that were recommended after Germanwings, and that are now run by many airlines, are a huge step forward. But they are only the beginning of what could become an ironclad system. A program pilots don’t fully trust will go unused when it matters most: Germanwings had a peer support program before the crash, but the copilot never came forward.
For the door to be truly open, a pilot who speaks up must be safe on every front:
- Financially. Grounding shouldn’t mean losing income. For many pilots, a smaller paycheck turns a mental health struggle into a debt crisis.
- Professionally. There must be a clear, time-limited path back to the cockpit.
- For the rest of their career. Once a pilot is cleared for duty, a past disclosure must never be used against them, not years later and not to deny a promotion or an upgrade.
- As a person. A pilot who comes forward must be heard and taken seriously, not sent home with the words, “It’s just stress, get some sleep.”
The flying public should understand that the safest pilots are those who are free to acknowledge their anxieties, and the aviation community should know that the best response when a colleague goes quiet after a bad approach is to ask about it and listen.
A broken leg heals in the open. Anxiety should be allowed to heal in the open, as well.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer or of any organization with which he is affiliated. No proprietary or confidential company information was used.
