Weird news: Plane crashes because the pilot was taking selfies

Selfies are all the rage now. You can see selfies everywhere, whether these be in the street, in parties, on top of tall buildings, in dangerous places, anywhere people can carry a phone (and sometimes have a selfie stick for this purpose). At the same time, the obsession with selfies can sometimes get too much; when a person is thinking about the location and the timing of taking a selfie, all other thought gets suppressed during this time. This can get dangerous when the person involved is doing some task that needs a lot of attention. This is similar to the dangers involved when a person has been wearing headphones and listening to music, and does not care about whether there are vehicles moving around and so on.
What can you say when a pilot, somebody who needs to focus entirely on his machine, suddenly apparently is busy trying to figure out how to take selfies, and endangers the entire flight and the lives of other people on board (link to article):

A pilot who died when he crashed his small aircraft was distracted because he was taking cell phone selfies in the cockpit, likely contributing to the fatal accident, US investigators have said. The 29-year-old and a passenger were killed instantly when his Cessna 150K smashed into a field on May 31 last year. A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) probe, using GoPro video taken in the cockpit, on Tuesday indicated that the pilot repeatedly took selfie photos with his phone leading up to the accident. "The evidence is consistent with an aerodynamic stall and subsequent spin into terrain," said an NTSB report.

Pilot dies while flying a Qatar Airlines flight, flight diverted to safety

When a flight is in the air, the only thing standing between the passengers and danger is the skill of the pilot, keeping the plane flying or landing safely. Towards this end, the pilot needs to be in perfectly good health, quick to react, able to think quickly, and very skilled. But, what happens when some sudden misfortune strikes the pilot ? There is a co-pilot who can take over, but typically the pilot has a much higher level of skill than the co-pilot. Consider the tragedy that occurred to this pilot, and the danger to the passengers of the Qatar Airlines flight (link to article):

Qatar Airways diverted its Manila-Doha flight to Kuala Lumpur early yesterday after the pilot suffered a massive heart attack on board and later died. The co-pilot flew the plane (Flight No QR645), with roughly 260 passengers on board, to Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) for emergency landing. He requested the KLIA authorities for permission to land after the pilot complained of chest pain, and urged that a medical team be kept ready so that the pilot could be provided medical care.
But the medical team declared the pilot dead after the flight landed at KLIA. The passengers on board were not told about the pilot’s condition, it is learnt. The deceased, Ajay Kukreja, was an Indian in his early forties. The flight took off from Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport early yesterday.

Pilots and cabin crew fight in mid-air

Taking a flight is now a normal state of affairs. You get into the flight, meet the smiling cabin crew, hear the voice of the captain (but normally don't get to see the captain), and after food and the flight duration, the flight lands, and you get off, not thinking about the flight again. What happens when things do not happen like this ? Passengers were shocked to witness a fight between the cabin crew and the pilots, with the pilots on one side and the cabin crew on the other side. This horrid scene (witnessed by passengers) was seen on a flight of the Indian Airlines, running between Sharjah and Delhi (link to article):

Endangering the lives of 106 passengers and grossly violating safety norms, the airline staffers came to blows in the cockpit and galley of the Indian Airlines Airbus A-320 as the aircraft cruised over Pakistan en route to Delhi via Lucknow from Sharjah. The cabin-vs-cockpit tiff originated on the ground in Sharjah itself and then turned into a full-blown fight once IC 884 took off soon after midnight.
The cabin crew alleged that pilots harassed a 24-year-old female colleague who later filed a molestation complaint against them with the cops after the flight landed in Delhi. The pilots, on the other hand, accused a male flight purser of misconduct that seriously compromised flight safety, and said the accusation of molestation aimed to protect the complainant's purser friend—who has a commercial pilot licence (CPL)—from facing action.

One can only hope that the airline and the flight regulators make sure that these people are penalized for their misconduct, and the airline is also prosecuted for this happening.

Pilot dies, but jet lands safely

This can be a bad situation, given that the pilots on modern planes have a huge amount of training before they are ready to fly modern planes. The dependence on pilots being fully aware when they are flying is pretty high, which is why if a pilot is caught drinking before a flight, it is taken very seriously. So, if a pilot is incapacitated during a flight or dies, it could become a problem. There is a co-pilot, but it is still risky. So it was a wonder that things went very smoothly on this Continental flight when the pilot died of natural causes during the flight (link to article):

The pilot of Continental Flight 61 died Thursday as the plane flew from Brussels, Belgium, to Newark, New Jersey, the Federal Aviation Administration and Continental Airlines said. The 60-year-old Newark-based pilot died of "apparently of natural causes" about halfway through the flight, the airline said. He had 32 years of service with Continental, it said. Passengers told CNN that they were not informed, and that the only indication of a problem was that an announcement for a doctor was made during the flight.
The airline said the crew on the flight included an additional relief pilot who took the place of the deceased man, and "the flight continued safely with two pilots at the controls." The Boeing 777 landed safely at Newark International Airport at 11:49 a.m. ET Thursday, the airline said.

Good that things went well, and the passengers were not notified during the flight so there were no panic situations.

Trying to land an airplane in the absence of a pilot

When you are being driven by somebody else, and something happens to the driver, most people will attempt to take over the driving themselves. Even if that fails, there is a good chance that even an accident will not lead to severe injuries; what happens when the controls are more complicated, and the injuries / damages that would happen in an accident are more likely to happen ? We are so dependent on air travel that we do not even try to consider the case of what happens when something happens to the pilot of the aircraft; well in the case of this small craft, there was a passenger who was able to fly the aircraft with some coaching (link to article):

It's a nightmarish scenario straight out of the movies: A passenger is forced to land a plane after its pilot becomes incapacitated. The reality was playing aboard a plane over Florida on Sunday in what the National Air Traffic Controllers Association called "an Easter miracle." The pilot notified controllers that the plane was at 9,000 feet and climbing, said Steve Wallace, Miami Center spokesman for the association. However, a controller at the center tried twice to raise the pilot after that and received no response, Wallace said.
After a few moments, a different voice came over the radio: Passenger Doug White told air traffic controllers the pilot was unconscious and they needed help. His wife and two teenage daughters were flying home to Louisiana with him, he said. He reported the plane's autopilot was on and the plane was continuing to climb from 10,000 feet. White later told the Naples Daily News he has a pilot's license and about 130 hours experience flying a single engine Cessna, but had never flown the larger, faster King Air.

This was a good coincidence, however, one shudders to think what would happen in the case when there was nobody available to pilot the aircraft; the family would have been acute distress at the impending disaster.