Talk:Suicide by pilot

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Suicide by pilot article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1: 12 months

Aviation: Accidents

This article is within the scope of the Aviation WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see lists of open tasks and task forces. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.AviationWikipedia:WikiProject AviationTemplate:WikiProject Aviationaviation

This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-class status:
Referencing and citation: criterion met Coverage and accuracy: criterion met Structure: criterion met Grammar and style: criterion met Supporting materials: criterion met

This article is supported by the Aviation accident project.

Crime and Criminal Biography: Serial, mass, and spree killers Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Crime and Criminal Biography, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Crime and Criminal Biography articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Crime and Criminal BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject Crime and Criminal BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Crime and Criminal BiographyCrime-related
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Serial Killer task force (assessed as High-importance).

Death: Suicide Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Death, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Death on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.DeathWikipedia:WikiProject DeathTemplate:WikiProject DeathDeath
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Suicide task force (assessed as Mid-importance).

Disaster management Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Disaster management, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Disaster management on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Disaster managementWikipedia:WikiProject Disaster managementTemplate:WikiProject Disaster managementDisaster management
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Different types of suicidal flights

It is truly disgusting to lump together in this article the heroic tokkotai (kamikaze) and selbstopfer pilots, who saw Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden cities burn in anglo-saxon carpet-bombings and tried to protect their compatriots from such barbarism, with life insurance fraudsters who called themselves pilots, etc. 78.131.76.158 (talk) 22:05, 9 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I won't call it heroic. If you are on the receiving end, it might be bad. If you are from Japan, it's heroic. However, I agree that it's an entirely different phenomenon. We are talking about the situations in which the pilot committed suicide while bringing all passengers with him (i.e. a murder-suicide). In war, there can't be "murders." Killing enemy combatants is expected. If an angry Japanese pilot deliberately crashed his plane onto his commander's car, then you can put it here. Otherwise, I think it can neither be called "suicide" nor "murder." The thing is, when people come to this article, they aren't expecting Kamikazees and terrorists. They are thinking about events like MH370. 2601:646:8881:A720:882A:1532:2DFF:5AA3 (talk) 11:02, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The article for Kamikaze opens with this (emphasis added): "'... were a part of the Japanese Special Attack Units of military aviators who flew suicide attacks for the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, intending to destroy warships more effectively than with conventional air attacks." A suicide for your country's war effort is still a suicide. The concepts of "shame" and "disgust" may be difficult to address in this article. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:43, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but it shouldn't be an article about general suicides. For example, someone piloting his own aircraft into the ocean alone is committing suicide. But it's not that different from someone jumping from the Imperial State building. The only difference is that the former happens to possess an aircraft. The question is not about semantics. People coming to this article come here for aviation disasters in which pilots bring the whole planes down. They don't come here for terrorist attacks. They don't come here for Kamikazees. 71.202.169.137 (talk) 23:50, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We need to distinguish this article from vehicular suicides. You can say Kamikazee is a form of vehicular suicides. 9/11 is a form of vehicular suicides. However, they aren't suicide by pilot since they are not civilian pilots who are employed to carry passengers. The thing is, aviation disaters involving civilian pilots is a phenomenon on its own that needs to be distinguished from Kamikazees and terrorism. 71.202.169.137 (talk) 23:57, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You can say all pilot suicides are a form of vehicular suicides, because an aircraft is a vehicle. I'd just expect to see less detail in vehicular suicide and a link to this article. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:55, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Don't you see the fact that civilian pilots deliberately crashing their own planes due to depression or mental health issues is a vastly different phenomenon from kamikazes and terrorist attacks like 9/11? If you don't, there's no point in arguing.71.202.169.137 (talk) 00:17, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I really didn't expect this article to cover kamikaze attacks and terrorism. Suicide isn't the primary purpose of those acts; killing other people is. One's own death is considered the price of performing such an attack, not an end in itself; if there was an even easier way to kill people (or cause destruction) in larger numbers without killing themselves, the attacker would have done that instead. Hijackers whose primary aim is to kill others shouldn't be included. These are merely suicide attacks. WP Ludicer (talk) 19:30, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Inclusion criteria proposal

Although I'll admit to being a guilty party, to prevent future article bloat per per WP:NOTEVERYTHING, I propose to limit this article to incidents that have received significant WP:RS coverage other than government aviation accident reports. Since every single modern fatality accident in most Western countries typically earns a government accident report, the existence of a report implicating pilot suicide doesn't necessarily establish notability, per WP:ROUTINE and WP:DEPTH. Thoughts? Carguychris (talk) 17:12, 3 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Craig D. Button

There is a valid hypothesis that Craig Button was not a suicide, see Talk:Craig D. Button § Possible alternative cause. Yes, it is not anywhere the majority opinion, and the RS has yet to be definitively located, but IMO it is plausible and enough to change his category from 'Believed to be suicide' to 'Possible suicide'. Thoughts? Tfdavisatsnetnet (talk) 16:26, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"second most prevalent cause of death"?s

"A Bloomberg News study conducted in June 2022, 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. Additionally, the study found that deaths resulting from pilot murder-suicides increased over the period from 1991 to 2020, while fatalities due to accidental causes significantly decreased"

Second most prevalent after what, deaths caused by pilot error and ahead of deaths caused by mechanical failure alone? Like how many different causes are they considering in this? And the fatalities that "decreased", is that total casualties or as a proportion of the whole? Gross or adjusted for the increased numbers of people flying? In any case it's not a huge surprise that in the few decades that saw 9/11 happen suicide/murder deaths rose and that accidental deaths went down as general technology and safety improved. Those just seem like kind of meaningless statistics, especially with no context. Idumea47b (talk) 13:25, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Am a little confused why this is described as a "Bloomberg News study" when the source given, at the end of the paragraph, is this:

Lewis, Russell; Forster, Estrella; Whinnery, James; Webster, Nicholas (February 2014). "Aircraft-Assisted Pilot Suicides in the United States, 2003-2012" (PDF). Civil Aerospace Medical Institute. NTL.BTS.gov. Federal Aviation Administration. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 3, 2015. Retrieved March 29, 2015.

Furthermore, that material should not appear only in the lead section. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:16, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]