A pilot hammering on a cockpit door over the Alps while a co-pilot calmly sets flight controls for death as passengers scream loudly enough to be heard on the flight recorder through an armoured door? It wouldn’t happen in a movie. Because the movie would end in under 40 minutes, just as Germanwings Flight 4U9525 did. You’d ask for your money back.

How was the tragedy even possible? You get what you pay for. Blame the international drive for cheapness above quality, which has outranked even post-9/11 international terrorism fears. Flights that used to have three qualified pilots — a captain, first officer and flight engineer — went down to two. Most modern cockpits don’t even have room for all three.

And this is what gave co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 27, his opportunity. As has been noted, the planned Airbus A320 flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf was so short that Lubitz could easily have thought he’d have no chance to be left alone to stage a catastrophe. Capt. Patrick Sondheimer might not have had to use a washroom, if that was what he did when he left the cockpit. But Lubitz, a former Burger King part-timer, got lucky, and 150 people were obliterated.

Two pilots are cheaper than three. In the U.S., the “rule of two” — meaning the pilot is never left alone in the cockpit — generally applies, but elsewhere that rule didn’t always exist because it was an expensive rule. I always assumed there was a washroom within the cockpit so pilots never had to venture out, but I seem to be alone even now in finding that reasonable.

And anyway the rule of two refers to crew members, not pilots. “It could be a flight attendant. It could be a customer service person,” federal Transport Minister Lisa Raitt said Friday. “But they have to be members of the cabin crew.” But what use is a flight attendant when a pilot is bent on murder and self-slaughter?

In the same way, flight attendants used to work on a 1:40 ratio, one attendant for every 40 passengers. But airlines began operating cheaper mini-airlines, partly to evade union battles, and they operated under a 1:50 ratio. WestJet and Sunwing got a 1:50 ratio in 2013 and other airlines followed suit despite union protests.

I’m not second-guessing airlines’ competence or devotion to safety. I sympathize with them, for nothing unites passengers more than the belief that their flight should be cheap. They are the stingiest and most demanding of all consumers.

People will pay through the nose for limos, restaurant meals and fine wine, all extraneous pleasures, but when it comes to one of the greatest wonders of the modern age — entering a tin can and flying anywhere in the world for no urgent reason — they expect a bargain.

Airlines fighting off cut-price websites like Expedia, with extreme competition from startup airlines, couldn’t raise their prices for passengers who can compare fares online in an instant. So they started charging for bags, meals, drinks and seat choice while devising seats to suit only the tiniest and most slender of passengers.

Passengers reacted with hostility and bad behaviour. The last time airlines were a glamour industry was probably the early 1970s. The unflappable US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who landed his Airbus A320 safely on the Hudson River in 2009, was candid about the decline in standards. Post-crash he told a U.S. government committee that his pay had dropped 40 per cent in recent years and he was without a pension. “I do not know a single, professional airline pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps.”

Without experienced pilots, he suggested, the next plane in trouble might not land as elegantly as did his.

It does seem as though economic factors are cresting to the point of disaster in many industries, and this is just a sign of the times. It seems impossible that only one engineer could have been manning the train that nearly destroyed the town of Lac-Mégantic or that trains derail so often now. But so often it’s down to one now. There’s one person behind the store counter. You weigh, label and check your own bags at the airport and order food on a tablet in a restaurant without wait staff.

We don’t blanch at this. We do it because we want a huge array of cheap things. Checking on the auction-like hard-sell CheapOair.ca, I found six airlines offering hundreds of flights each weekday from Barcelona to Dusseldorf via various cities, the main factor being price. They’re ludicrously cheap.

But it’s a vicious circle. In search of a bargain, we are ourselves paid less and then we chase our own tails.

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At some point, instead of this relentless war to the bottom, regulations should put safety first rather than price or convenience. I want higher airfares and increased safety, the same way I want higher taxes and a subway system that doesn’t shut down weekly for repairs, flooding and leaks.

I write this knowing it won’t happen but I want it all the same