The voice recorder tape recovered from a Germanwings aircraft that crashed into the French Alps delivered a chilling message. When the captain left the cockpit to visit the toilet the co-pilot locked him out and sent the plane to it's doom. The captain can be heard hammering on the door and demanding admittance. Then comes the shriek of the "ground proximity "warning alarm and the screams of the terrified passengers - and then an abrupt silence. It seems that the likely cause was an emotional breakup between the co-pilot and his fiancee - leading to a suicide that included one hundred and forty nine other innocent people.
This was not an entirely isolated incident. Since 1976 there have been at least eight plane crashes that have been deliberately caused by a crew member. In April 1994 a Federal Express employee hitched a ride on a DC10 freighter flying from Tennessee to California, a privilege sanctioned by the company. He attacked the three pilots with a spear gun and metal hammers and two of the wounded crew grappled with him while the pilot - drifting in and out of consciousness - managed to safely land the plane. The attacker had ambitions to become a pilot but was failing his grades and believed that the insurance involved in his death in a plane crash would provide the security for his estranged wife and child he could not deliver. He is now serving a lengthy prison sentence.
In December 1997 a Silk Air plane flying over Indonesian territory broke the sound barrier when it dived at maximum power and crashed into a muddy river, killing all one hundred and four people aboard. The captain sent the co-pilot out of the cockpit and locked the door, before deliberately crashing the plane. It was later revealed that he was a former high ranking air force officer who played the stock exchange, trading on margins. The Asian economic crisis had left him short and he was just days away from bankruptcy - and in an Asian society that is socially untenable. He hoped that insurance from his death would solve his financial problems and spare his family humiliation.
In October 1999 an Egypt Air Boeing 767 mysteriously crashed into the ocean on a flight from New York to Cairo. One of the relief crew pilots was known to solicit sex on American city stopovers and on this trip his boss was amongst the passengers. When he solicited sex from a chambermaid at a city hotel this resulted in a complaint made to his boss. He was carpeted - and perhaps unwisely - his boss told him his flying days were over and when they returned to Cairo he would be demoted to a desk job. When he was along in the cockpit on the return flight he took the aircraft off autopilot and killed all the two hundred and seventeen people aboard.
The ghosts of Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 lingers in the minds of many people. It seems inconceivable that a modern airliner can stray off course and disappear without trace, but so far the mystery is beyond solution. Untold millions are being spent searching for the wreckage - and there is suspicion that this disappearance could have been a bizarre form of suicide by a crew member. The entire airline industry is beefing up cabin procedures. In future, it is unlikely that the rules will allow a single person to be alone in the plane's cockpit under any circumstances.
Unfortunately, the publicity surrounding the MH 370 disappearance may have put this form of suicide into other people's minds. It seems certain that passengers will wonder what pressures and anxieties exist in the life of those piloting planes they are carried in - and it is a fact that events that excite the news media tend to invite repetition. In a disturbed mind, crashing a plane may seem an entirely reasonable method of suicide. That is often termed the " copycat "syndrome.
Perhaps we have awakened a sleeping giant. It is not only the airline industry that puts the lives of others at risk. Should the driver of a packed commuter train decide to end his or her life in a blaze of glory and open the throttle to maximum speed and ignore all signals - the end result would be catastrophic. The opportunity for mayhem exists with tourist buses and with the drivers of all sorts of heavy transport. The main danger is that this form of personal annihilation involving taking down a group of other people as company may appeal to disturbed minds. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how any reasonable defence is possible.
Fortunately, taken in the context of the entire airline industry the incidence of suicide at the controls of an aircraft is minimal in relation to the numbers of flights that occur daily. Horrifying as that concept may be, it simply reinforces the claim that flying is still the safest form of transport when all risks are taken into account !
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