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Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

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Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#61

Post by toast0 »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #34

Considering more and more aircraft is fly by wire and most pilots get their "air time" in sims, is there not a advantage in building a mock cockpit at the back of the airline with a backup pilot to take over when other protocols are met? All this is doing is highlighting how one person beit the president or prime minister of a country, judge's, GP's, practically anyone including a pilot can steal some or all of other…

It's all about tradeoffs. You could increase the number of pilots to hopefully reduce the number of these incidents, but the added complexity might increase other incidents and would reduce the capacity for paid passengers and increase the labor costs when there's already a shortage of qualified pilots willing to work for the airlines.

Same thing with the doors. They got strong locks and protocols to use them in response to rare events, but it makes other rare events harder to manage.

We generally live in a pretty trusting world, which enables many things, including violations of trust with major consequences.

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#62

Post by [deleted] »

MBCook wrote: post #52
cm2187 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what I don’t understand. Do they just ignore the passengers when they want to just commit suicide? Seems hard to believe a professional pilot would not have the passengers in mind. Otherwise you need someone who is both suicidal and with psychopathic murderous pulsions, which should be extremely rare. But clearly it’s not. Like for school shootings, I wonder how much one event inspires the next one.

Yes. Look up the German Wings case, flight 9525. In short one pilot waited for the other to leave the cockpit, locked the door, and deliberately crashed the plane. He was so suicidal and distraught (thought he was going blind and thus would lose his job) he was willing to do it. If you read the full story it’s even sadder.

[deleted]

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#63

Post by halefx »

supertrope wrote: post #41
Retric wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about the raw numbers but that “fatalities caused by murder-suicides are becoming an increasingly large share of the total.” The assumption is this a very low probability event that’s neither increasing or decreasing, but if you improve everything else then then people are just going to hear about murder cases like this.

Kind of like how child mortality in car crashes has decreased below gunshot deaths. And all other pediatric causes of death are now dwarfed by those two.

That study compared car crashes during Covid lockdown (when people drove far, far less) to gunshot deaths for 1-19 year olds. The overwhelming majority of gun violence is the US is gang activity which is populated heavily by 18 & 19 year old adults. If you consider them "children" for one study, yep, you'll get misleading results.

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#64

Post by rkk3 »

MBCook wrote: post #52
cm2187 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what I don’t understand. Do they just ignore the passengers when they want to just commit suicide? Seems hard to believe a professional pilot would not have the passengers in mind. Otherwise you need someone who is both suicidal and with psychopathic murderous pulsions, which should be extremely rare. But clearly it’s not. Like for school shootings, I wonder how much one event inspires the next one.

Yes. Look up the German Wings case, flight 9525. In short one pilot waited for the other to leave the cockpit, locked the door, and deliberately crashed the plane. He was so suicidal and distraught (thought he was going blind and thus would lose his job) he was willing to do it. If you read the full story it’s even sadder.

And just like school shootings, that German pilot studied MH370. The MH370 pilot likely did the same thing. He was separated from his wife & at his house they found he practiced the crash route on Microsoft Flight simulator.

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#65

Post by anoonmoose »

halefx wrote: post #63
supertrope wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of like how child mortality in car crashes has decreased below gunshot deaths. And all other pediatric causes of death are now dwarfed by those two.

That study compared car crashes during Covid lockdown (when people drove far, far less) to gunshot deaths for 1-19 year olds. The overwhelming majority of gun violence is the US is gang activity which is populated heavily by 18 & 19 year old adults. If you consider them "children" for one study, yep, you'll get misleading results.

That study, which was linked to by me and another person, includes this chart, which shows that falling youth motor vehicle deaths and rising youth gunshot deaths are both long term trends

https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#66

Post by _moof »

phkahler wrote: post #12

>> Preliminary evidence suggests the crash of a China Eastern Airlines Corp. jet in March may be the latest such tragedy, a person familiar with the investigation said. What is the preliminary evidence? For this type of conclusion I would think the first and last bit of evidence would be the control inputs as recorded by the black box. Supporting evidence should be on the voice recording. What is this "preliminary ev…

Probably the other way around. There is a sensory illusion that occurs when accelerating that will induce a pilot to deliberately push nose down, sometimes aggressively. It's powerful - I've seen people do it. (And then quickly took over!) The Atlas crash a few years back was caused by this.

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#67

Post by _moof »

mattkrause wrote: post #24
jaywalk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video of the plane going down is enough to strongly suggest it. It was almost completely nose-down before it hit the ground, which is basically not going to happen without the pilot commanding it.

This is also (IIRC) how one recovers from a stall, so it could be a “malign” command, a best-effort at fixing a bigger problem, or anything in between.

You recover from a stall by relaxing back pressure, not by pushing nose down. If you're pushing when you stall, you're scaring your instructor. :)

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#68

Post by throwaway894345 »

supertrope wrote: post #41
Retric wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about the raw numbers but that “fatalities caused by murder-suicides are becoming an increasingly large share of the total.” The assumption is this a very low probability event that’s neither increasing or decreasing, but if you improve everything else then then people are just going to hear about murder cases like this.

Kind of like how child mortality in car crashes has decreased below gunshot deaths. And all other pediatric causes of death are now dwarfed by those two.

I don't think child mortality in car crashes has decreased below gunshot deaths. There was a recent economist headline which suggested that gunshot deaths surpassed car accident deaths for young people, but they defined "young people" as 1-24 year olds so as to exclude infant mortality deaths on the low end of the age range and include gun deaths on the high end of the age range. The latter is the most important because those gun deaths were dominated by the 18-24 age range (and within that cohort, black males were driving the gun deaths). Further, it's not so much that car accident deaths decreased below gun deaths as much as gun deaths have increased--specifically, the gun death curve for "young people" mirrors the overall US homicide curve strongly suggesting that the increasing gun deaths among young people are also caused by the same thing as overall homicides: changes in policing over the last decade.

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#69

Post by mensetmanusman »

teeray wrote: post #16
mensetmanusman wrote: post #8

A nose dive maneuver (and any that are clearly anomalous and dangerous) should require simultaneous action by the co-pilot as the likelihood of a double murder-suicide would be incredibly small.

Anomalous maneuvers are exactly those used to recover from stalls and the like.

Would it be possible to detect stalls and other situations that could override the copilot requirement?

I’m wondering what happens when the M/S death rate is 100x the stall death rate; would engineering controls would be added?

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#70

Post by mensetmanusman »

milesdyson_phd wrote: post #9
mensetmanusman wrote: post #8

A nose dive maneuver (and any that are clearly anomalous and dangerous) should require simultaneous action by the co-pilot as the likelihood of a double murder-suicide would be incredibly small.

For the majority of charter/private/business flights this wouldn't be feasible as the vast majority of flights tend to be single pilot ops.

Such a requirement could be for large passenger jets only.
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