New Orleans (WGNO) – As investigators in Germany continue to gather clues to figure out why Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz allegedly flew a jet full of passengers into a mountain, frequent flyer Brian Hennessy says he has complete confidence in aviation safety.

“I would get on a Lufthansa flight tomorrow,” he said.

In fact, Hennessy isn’t just a passenger, he’s a pilot. The managing partner of Blue Hawk Aviation is also a commercial pilot for a major U.S. airline. He’s flown plenty of Airbus A320’s, the aircraft involved in the Germanwings disaster.

In addition to a questionable mental state, Hennessy questions the 27-year-old pilot’s experience.

“What is surprising to me is the lack of flight time he had, and that’s just relative to the U.S., where he couldn’t have been sitting in that seat with less than 1,500 hours of flighttime. I think I read, he had somewhere between 600 and 700 hours of flight time total.”

Hennessy, who has logged more than 4,000 flight hours, says this incident is a unique example of failed cockpit integrity.

“It’s the other side of the coin. After September 11th it was imperative that we make the cockpit into a fortress because we absolutely know with 100 percent certainty what the terrorists will do if they get access to the cockpit, so that’s not an issue any more, but how do you plan for something like this, which has such a low, low probability of happening?”

Since 9/11, the Federal Aviation Administration requires U.S. carriers to have two crew members in the cockpit at all times, so if a pilot steps out, a flight attendant steps in; but that’s not the case with carriers around the world.

Experts says alternatives such as retrofitting aircraft with lavatories reserved for pilot use —or requiring three pilots to be aboard every flight — could work, but they are cost-prohibitive.

Hennessy says instead of worrying about mentally ill pilots, we should be worried about tired ones.

“Fatigue is a much bigger issue. It’s one of the issues that probably needs to be tackled before we unwind, or even think of unwinding, security policies put in place after September 11^th,” he said.

But he urges anyone heading to the airport with safety concerns to remember this, “You’re much safer, infinitely safer almost, getting in a U.S. commercial airliner or a reputable European carrier than you are just driving to work in the morning.”

Source: WGNO ABC, http://wgno.com/2015/03/27/aviation-expert-says-pilot-fatigue-is-a-greater-risk-than-incidents-like-the-germanwings-crash/