London Times yesterday analysis item triggered by new MH370 story.
The takeover of Flight MH370 by a pilot who crashed the Boeing in a remote site in the Indian ocean emerged as the most plausible explanation of the disaster after the airliner’s track was identified and debris was found in 2015 (Charles Bremner writes).
Pilots who deliberately crash their airliners, taking all aboard to their doom, have become a leading cause of fatal crashes as safety advances have greatly reduced accidents to a near negligible level, at least in the developed world. As recently as March this year, a pilot on a China Eastern Boeing 737 is thought to have taken over the aircraft and dived it into the ground near the city of Wuzhou, killing all 132 aboard.
The investigation is still open, but people involved in the downloading of the airliner’s black box flight recorders in the United States said in May that only human action such as murder-suicide by a pilot could explain the near vertical trajectory of the aircraft.
If the China Eastern crash is confirmed as intentional, it will raise suicide-murder by a pilot to the biggest cause of loss of life in commercial airline accidents in recent decades. In June, a Bloomberg study of crashes involving Western-built commercial airliners found that pilot murder-suicide was the second most common cause of deaths in airline crashes from 2011 to 2020. Apart from the China Eastern crash, at least five other airline pilots have deliberately killed themselves along with 543 people in the past 25 years.
Airlines have screened their flight crews for psychological difficulties for decades but medical secrecy and pilots’ reluctance to reveal troubles make it difficult to supervise their state beyond initial training. This was demonstrated by the crash of the Germanwings Airbus into the French Alps, killing 150, in 2015. Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot, had been treated for suicidal tendencies but concealed his depression from his employers. He locked the captain out of the flight deck and put the airliner into a dive until it hit the French mountains on a flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. Airlines in Europe tightened their monitoring of crews’ mental state after the disaster as a result.
Most of the homicidal airline pilots have been under stress over legal, work, financial or relationship crises or suffering mental problems and all appeared to have planned their crimes, the accident record shows. The suspected rogue pilot of Malaysia Flight 370 would have gone to great lengths to divert the Boeing 777 while switching off its radar and radio transmissions then flying it for six hours across the Indian ocean, presumably with the passengers all dead from hypoxia (insufficient oxygen).
Airlines and their governments when national prestige is involved, are sometimes reluctant to accept crash investigators’ conclusions of murder-suicide by pilots.
American investigators concluded that the captain of a SilkAir Boeing 737 had deliberately crashed the aircraft into a river after plummeting from 35,000 feet in 1997. Indonesian authorities rejected the findings and their investigation concluded that there had been no identifiable cause for the disaster that killed 104 people..