Murder-suicide by pilot cases don’t receive nearly as much public attention as mass shootings, and thankfully, they are far less common. Yet these cases, when they occur, tend to be far more deadly, killing hundreds of people rather than dozens. Mental illness transcends all walks of life, and if a pilot is suicidal or mentally ill, they might decide on a murder-suicide plot, killing themselves by crashing the plane and taking their passengers with them.

Cases of murder-suicide by pilots

Here are some examples of pilots killing themselves by crashing their plane:

Chinese pilot crashes passenger jet in murder-suicide
U.S officials say a China Eastern passenger jet that took a vertical nosedive on March 21, 2022, killing all 132 people on board, was a suicide by pilot “The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” say crash investigators who analyzed its black box. Investigators also found evidence that one of the pilots was struggling with personal issues prior to the crash.. (The Week, 5-27-2022, p. 9)

Was the missing Malaysian airlines jet a case of murder-suicide by pilot?
Though we may not ever know for certain, one of the leading theories behind the missing Malaysian passenger jet that vanished in 2014, presumably killing all 239 people on board, is that it was a case of murder-suicide by one of the pilots. The plane inexplicably turned around mid-flight, doing a U-turn and heading toward open ocean. It then climbed to an altitude that would have put all the passengers into a deep sleep from a lack of oxygen if the cabin were depressurized (a condition that would have subsequently killed them before any crash). The jet and all its people then seemed to vanish in mid-flight. Wreckage of the plane has yet to be found.