Preventing plane-assisted suicides through the lessons of research on homicide and suicide-homicide

Commercial Aircraft-Assisted Suicide Accident Investigations Re-Visited—Agreeing to Disagree?

Background: The number of aircraft-assisted suicides can only be considered a rough estimate because it is difficult and, at times, impossible to identify all cases of suicide. Methods: Four recent reports of accidents occurring in 1997 in Indonesia, 1999 in Massachusetts in the United States, 2013 in Namibia, and 2015 in France related to commercial aircraft-assisted suicides were analyzed. This analysis relied on data extracted from the accident reports that supported aircraft-assisted suicide from the: (a) cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR), (b) medical history, (c) psychosocial history, (d) toxicology, (e) autopsy, and (f) any methodology that utilized aviation medicine. There are some limitations in this study. Although all analyzed accident investigations followed ICAO Annex 13 guidelines, there is variability in their accident investigations and reporting. In addition, accident investigation reports represent accidents from 1997 to 2015, and during this time, there has been a change in the way accidents are reported. The nature of this analysis is explorative. The aim was to identify how the various aircraft accident investigators concluded that the accidents were due to suicidal acts. Results: In all four accident reports, FDR data were available. CVR data were also available, except for one accident where CVR data were only partially available. Comprehensive medical and psychosocial histories were available in only one of four of the accident reports. Conclusion: To prevent accidents involving commercial aircraft, it is necessary to identify the causes of these accidents to be able to provide meaningful safety recommendations. A detailed psychological autopsy of pilots can and likely will assist in investigations, as well as generate recommendations that will substantially contribute to mitigating accidents due to pilot suicide. Airborne image recording may be a useful tool to provide additional information about events leading up to a crash and thus assist in accident investigations.

Copycats in Pilot Aircraft-Assisted Suicides after the Germanwings Incident

Aircraft-assisted pilot suicide is a rare but serious phenomenon. The aim of this study was to evaluate changes in pilot aircraft-assisted suicide risks, i.e., a copycat effect, in the U.S. and Germany after the Germanwings 2015 incident in the French Alps. Aircraft-assisted pilot suicides were searched in the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident investigation database and in the German Bundestelle für Flugunfalluntersuchung (BFU) Reports of Investigation database five years before and two years after the deliberate crash of the Germanwings flight into the French Alps in 2015. The relative risk (RR) of the aircraft-assisted pilot suicides was calculated. Two years after the incident, three out of 454 (0.66%) fatal incidents were aircraft-assisted suicides compared with six out of 1292 (0.46%) in the prior five years in the NTSB database. There were no aircraft-assisted pilot suicides in the German database during the two years after or five years prior to the Germanwings crash. The relative aircraft-assisted pilot suicide risk for the U.S. was 1.4 (95% CI 0.3–4.2) which was not statistically significant. Six of the pilots who died by suicide had told someone of their suicidal intentions. We consider changes in the rate to be within a normal variation. Responsible media coverage of aircraft incidents is important due to the large amount of publicity that these events attract.