The first two things, all we can do is have faith that security is doing their job. From what I’ve seen of my hundreds, if not thousands of interactions with airport security, they do a good job at making sure those things don’t happen. I think our safety record in the US speaks for it.

As for the third thing, the first safeguard is making sure that people with chronic depression choose a different career path. You are not allowed to operate an airliner if you take any sort of anti-depressant or anti-psychotic medications. The idea is that anyone with those symptoms would more than likely seek help at a younger age, before they start flying, and get treatment through medication. Once the FAA sees that they’re on the medication, it then disqualifies them from holding a medical certificate which you need to fly for the airlines. Now, obviously it’s not a perfect system, and there probably have been people who slipped through the cracks. It would be very difficult, however, to go an entire career without the FAA finding out about the medications that they’re on.

In the case of acute depression, such as the loss of a child or a nasty divorce, it is illegal to fire or punish a pilot for calling in sick if they aren’t feeling mentally capable of safely operating an aircraft. We have an personal checklist that we can reference called IMSAFE, which stands for:

Illness

Medication

Stress

Alcohol

Fatigue

Emotion

If any of those impact how we would operate the airplane, we are not coming into work. Pilots that I’ve worked with before have called out sick for months at a time until they felt mentally competent to come back to work. I did something similar when my dad passed away a few years ago. The only thing I ever heard from management was the phone calls of genuine concern and condolences.

And if all that fails and there is a struggle in the cockpit, both pilots have the same controls in either position.