PARIS — Europe’s top air safety regulator Friday called for a series of measures aimed at strengthening the medical and psychological oversight of the region’s commercial airline pilots, including random drug and alcohol testing of flight crews.
The report with the recommendations has been presented to the European transportation commissioner, Violeta Bulc, for review.
It follows more than two months of discussions led by the regulator, the European Aviation Safety Agency, after the March 24 crash of a Germanwings airliner into the French Alps. The flight’s copilot had a history of severe depression and had shown suicidal tendencies.
If accepted by the European Commission officials, the changes could take effect within the next year. But the initial proposal has already been watered down, notably because of privacy concerns from Germany. Officials said they were prepared for delicate negotiations over the coming months with European pilots’ unions, which have until now resisted such monitoring as overly intrusive and only minimally effective in improving safety.
“If improvements are to be made in the European safety and security rules or in their implementation, in order to help prevent future accidents or incidents, we will take the necessary action at EU level,” Bulc said in a statement.
Aside from its new medical oversight proposals, the task force said it would maintain its recommendation that two crew members be present in the cockpit at all times.
The two-person rule, which was standard in the United States and other parts of the world after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was not widely adopted in Europe before the Germanwings crash.
The Federal Aviation Administration in the United States is also conducting a review of existing standards and procedures for pilot medical oversight and cockpit door security. Its findings are expected to be published by the end of this year.
Patrick Ky, the European Aviation Safety Agency’s executive director and chairman of the task force that issued the report, said in a telephone interview from Brussels that most of the recommendations were “common sense.”
“We will never find a magic set of tools or solutions that can prevent every kind of accident,” he said, “but let’s try to do our best to maximize our chances of preventing this kind of thing from happening again.”
French investigators say the 27-year-old copilot of the Germanwings flight, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately crashed the Airbus A320 after locking the captain out of the cockpit on a flight to Düsseldorf, Germany, from Barcelona. Lubitz and the 149 other people on board were killed.
Investigators have not uncovered any evidence that Lubitz used illegal drugs or alcohol, but the task force identified drug and alcohol abuse as “one of the disorders potentially affecting the mental health of pilots for which screening tests are readily available,” the agency said in a statement.
The task force included a dozen representatives from airlines, pilots unions, medical advisers, and regulators.
Although Lubitz was a high-profile example of pilot suicide, his was not an isolated case. Over the past two decades, at least a half-dozen fatal airline crashes have been attributed to deliberate actions by the pilot.
Other episodes and close calls have been quietly played down by investigators. Until now, none have led to significant changes in the regulation of the psychological health of pilots.
The task force cited a 2013 report by the Civil Aviation Authority of Britain that found that of the 31 air accidents caused by a pilot medical issue from 1980 to 2011, 20 were “of psychiatric cause.” The highest proportion of the psychiatric causes — 60 percent — was linked to drug or alcohol use.
A number of countries, including the United States and Australia, require airline pilots to submit to random tests for the use of alcohol and certain controlled substances, including amphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, and opiates.
Flight attendants, aircraft mechanics, air traffic controllers, and others in “safety sensitive” roles are also subject to drug testing.
Some European countries, notably in Scandinavia, routinely test pilots, but there is no standard that applies to the roughly 65,000 commercial pilots based in the 28-member European Union.
“We need to have a European mandate on this, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have individual national laws,” Ky said.
Ky said the European requirements would be modeled on the current policy of the FAA, which randomly selects 25 percent of aviation industry personnel for drug testing and 10 percent for alcohol testing every year. Initially, such testing would apply only to pilots, although it could eventually be extended to other employees who are critical to maintaining safety, he said.
In the weeks after the Germanwings crash, Carsten Spohr, the chief executive of Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, proposed that regulators also consider screening pilots for the presence of antidepressants or other psychiatric drugs.
That idea was rejected, and Ky said that there were no plans to test for prescription medications. “If we extend the scope, we run the risk of too many false alarms,” he said.
Random drug and alcohol testing has long been opposed by pilots’ unions, who have tended to view such policies as inefficient: Less than 0.49 percent of the roughly 50,000 US airline pilots who were screened tested positive for drugs or alcohol in 2013, the most recent year for which FAA statistics were available.
“It produces very few positive outcomes,” Captain Martin Chalk, the president of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations, said in a recent interview. “Those who want to stay below the radar can do so.”