Abstract
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.
Highlights
Aircraft-assisted pilot suicide is an extremely rare event
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) database was searched on 30 December 2017, using the following search words: “suicide”, “murder-suicide” and “homicide-suicide”
Fatal aviation accidents in the U.S, with full formal accident investigation reports finalized at the time of the search and the cause of accidents assessed as pilot suicide in the accident investigations, were included as index cases in this study
Summary
Aircraft-assisted pilot suicide is an extremely rare event. The consequences may affect a large number of bystanders [1,2,3,4]. Regular aeromedical assessments are mandatory for pilots and several suicide risk factors, such as previous suicide attempts or acute major depressive disorder, limit or prevent fitness to fly [5,6]. Estimates of aircraft-assisted pilot suicides from the U.S between 1993 and 2002 were 0.44% (16 of 3648 fatal accidents) [7] and between 2003 and 2012 were 0.22% (eight of 3596 fatal accidents), showing an overall 20-year period estimate of aircraft-assisted suicides in the. Res. Public Health 2018, 15, 491; doi:10.3390/ijerph15030491 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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