Suicide by aircraft

Suicide by aircraft or aircraft-assisted suicide is an aviation event in which a pilot or another person onboard deliberately crashes or attempts to crash an aircraft as an act of suicide, with or without the intention of causing harm to passengers on board or civilians on the ground. If others are killed, it may be considered an act of murder–suicide or mass murder. It is suspected to have been a possible cause in several commercial and private aircraft crashes and has been confirmed as the cause in other instances. Determining a motive can be challenging and sometimes impossible for investigators to conclude especially if the suspected pilot sabotages or disengages their in-flight recorder or in-flight tracker. In the United States, investigations are primarily undertaken by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Investigators do not classify aircraft incidents as suicides unless there is compelling evidence indicating that the pilot intended suicide. This evidence may include suicide notes, past suicide attempts, explicit threats of suicide, a documented history of alcohol abuse, drug addiction, depression, or other forms of mental illness. One study conducted on pilot suicides between 2002 and 2013 identified eight cases as definite suicides, along with five additional cases of undetermined cause that may have been suicides. In some cases, investigators may collaborate with terrorism experts to investigate potential connections to extremist groups, aiming to ascertain whether the suicide was an act of terrorism.

A Bloomberg News study conducted in June 2022, focusing on crashes involving Western-built commercial airliners, revealed that pilot murder-suicides ranked as the second most prevalent cause of airline crash deaths between 2011 and 2020. Additionally, the study found that deaths resulting from pilot murder-suicides increased over the period from 1991 to 2020, while fatalities due to accidental causes significantly decreased. However, most cases of suicide by pilot involve general aviation in small aircraft, where typically the pilot is the sole occupant of the aircraft. In approximately half of these cases, the pilot had consumed drugs, often alcohol or antidepressants, which would typically result in a ban on flying. Many of these pilots have concealed their mental illness histories from regulators.