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 has been confirmed as the cause in several commercial and private aircraft crashes. 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. Most cases of suicide by pilot involve general aviation in small aircraft, where 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 concealed their mental illness histories from regulators.
Investigators do not classify aircraft incidents as suicides unless there is compelling evidence, which may include suicide notes, past suicide attempts, explicit threats of suicide, or a documented history of alcohol abuse, drug addiction, depression, or other forms of mental illness. One study analyzing pilot suicides between 2002 and 2013 identified eight cases as definite suicides, and five cases 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 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. The study also found that such deaths increased over the period from 1991 to 2020, while deaths due to accidental causes significantly decreased.

World War II suicide attacks

During World War II, the Russian aviator Nikolai Gastello was the first Soviet pilot credited with a (later disputed) "fire taran" in a suicide attack by an aircraft on a ground target, although his aircraft had been shot down and was in a rapid partially controllable descent. Another early example took place during the attack on Pearl Harbor where First Lieutenant Fusata Iida, commander of the Japanese 3rd Air Group, told his men before taking off, that if his aircraft were to become badly damaged he would crash it into a "worthy enemy target".
In the following years there were more suicide attacks; the best known by military aviators are the attacks from the Empire of Japan, called kamikaze, against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II. These attacks were designed to destroy warships more effectively than was possible with conventional attacks; between October 1944 and 1945, 3,860 kamikaze pilots died by suicide in this manner.

List of declared or suspected aircraft suicides
This list excludes military and wartime suicide attacks on enemy targets (see section above).

By pilots in control of whole flight

By hijackers

Published studies
A 2016 study published in Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance analyzed suicide and homicide-suicide events involving aircraft. They state, "In aeromedical literature and in the media, these very different events are both described as pilot suicide, but in psychiatry they are considered separate events with distinct risk factors." In the years 1999–2015 the study found 65 cases of pilot suicide (compared to 195 pilot errors) and six cases of passengers who jumped from aircraft. There were 18 cases of homicide-suicide, totaling 732 deaths; of these events, 13 were perpetrated by pilots. Compared to non-aviation samples, a large percentage of pilot suicides in this study were homicide-suicides (17%).

Prevention
U.S. regulations require at least two flight crew members to be in the cockpit at all times for safety reasons, to be able to help in any medical or other emergency, including intervening if a crew member tries to crash the plane. Following the deliberate crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 on March 24, 2015, some European, Canadian and Japanese airlines adopted a two-in-cockpit policy as did all Australian airlines for aircraft with 50 or more passenger seats.

See also
Aviation accidents and incidents
Aviation safety
List of aircraft hijackings, for instances where a hijacker crashed the aircraft
Vehicle ramming attack
Mental health in aviation
Suicide by cop
John Verrept, the first person in history to commit suicide with a plane

References

External links
Deliberate acts: 5 cases of pilots intentionally crashing at cnn.com
List of aircraft accidents and incidents intentionally caused by pilots Archived January 8, 2022, at the Wayback Machine at aviation-safety.net
Pilot suicide cases few and far between at canberratimes.com