Bizav Has Lower Threat of ‘Rogue’ Pilots than Airlines

“The anonymity in today’s large carriers where you don’t fly with the same people” puts airlines at more risk for rogue pilots than business aviation, where “we fly with the same people, which allows us to keep an eye on people in our organization,” Thomas Anthony, director of USC’s aviation safety and security program, said on Friday at the Flight Safety Foundation/NBAA Business Aviation Safety Seminar in Austin, Texas. During his presentation, “Human Factors in Extremis: The Rogue Pilot Phenomenon,” he specifically discussed aviation’s most unsettling accident cause: pilot murder-suicide.

Should Malaysia Airlines MH370 join the identified cases of last year’s German Wings Flight 9525 and 2013's Air Mozambique’s LAM470, “Then you would have three [pilot murder-suicide] primary causes of fatal commercial accidents in three successive years,” said Anthony. “I think that’s significant.”

Unlike “accidents based on wreckage, this brings us into an area of the profiler of criminal behavior, and the psychology of murder-suicide—a very different area of inquiry,” he noted. “Murder-suicide is premeditated; it’s not out of the blue.”