Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount | Hacker News Reader

Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

bloomberg.com

58 pointspseudolus86 comments

It may be that pilot murder-suicides are a terrible problem, but the data in this article does not back this up. The graph of the data they show is an almost textbook-grade ‘evil’ graph.

What the graph shows is that

* all cause flying mortality is way, way down over the last 30 years

* in raw deaths 2011-2020 was way up over prior decade but only slightly up over the one prior to that

* there has been one crash this year that might have been an m-s crash.

The graph doesn’t use the same time scales for the different bar charts, and doesn’t show any useful data like

* percentages against all air travelers or flights (way, way up since the 90s and down during covid)

* unit number of crashes

* that the stats might be ‘0’ this year after all depending on outcome of investigation of a single flight

Given all this and the raw numbers of people (single digit hundreds per decade), it’s also possible that rather than this being an epidemic, there were like 4 crashes in the 1990s, 0 in the 2000s, 3 in the 2010s, and possibly 1 so far in the early 2020s.

Again, terrible, but if this is the situation, then appropriate response might not be mass publicity, especially because stories like this can be memetically viral and help cause the behavior they describe.

It’s not about the raw numbers but that “fatalities caused by murder-suicides are becoming an increasingly large share of the total.”

The assumption is this a very low probability event that’s neither increasing or decreasing, but if you improve everything else then then people are just going to hear about murder cases like this.

Kind of like how child mortality in car crashes has decreased below gunshot deaths. And all other pediatric causes of death are now dwarfed by those two.

Source? I don't think that is an accurate summary, but curious what data you based it on.

edit: Ty!

edit2: ouch at that firearm suicide number jump

This article links to the study that made the claim, and many articles like this were circulating recently

https://www.webmd.com/children/news/20220422/guns-now-leadin...

This is in the United States: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761

That study compared car crashes during Covid lockdown (when people drove far, far less) to gunshot deaths for 1-19 year olds. The overwhelming majority of gun violence is the US is gang activity which is populated heavily by 18 & 19 year old adults. If you consider them "children" for one study, yep, you'll get misleading results.

That study, which was linked to by me and another person, includes this chart, which shows that falling youth motor vehicle deaths and rising youth gunshot deaths are both long term trends

https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...

Both of those trends show decreasing deaths until about 2013, after which point they began rising again. Notably, the gunshot death curve resembles the overall US homicide death curve, and we have a pretty good idea what was driving that trend.

I'm reading this pretty differently from you, I think. In my view, it looks like until 2013, car deaths were dropping dramatically, and have mostly been bouncing around a steady state since. Whereas deaths were dropping slightly until 2013, and have increased significantly in the years since that. The 2020 car deaths value is close to the 2013-2020 average, but the 2020 (and 2019, and 2018, and 2017) gun deaths are higher than the 2013-2020 average.

Yeah, my claim was simplistic, but the overall idea holds: in both cases there was a marked downward trend until an inflection point in 2013. For gun deaths, that inflection point was a reversal of the downward trend, and for traffic deaths it was an increase followed by a decrease, followed by an increase, but on average since 2013 it's probably pretty level. In whichever case, my point was that it doesn't make sense to characterize traffic deaths as a "long term downward trend" nor to characterize gun deaths as "a long term upward trend".

Traffic fatalities where up in 2020 (38,824) and 2021 (42,915) vs 2019(36,355) and 2018(36,835). Fatalities per 100 million VMT jumped more dramatically to 1.34 in 2020 vs 1.1 in 2019.

I don’t know why. It might just be random variance, but it’s possible fewer drivers on the roads meant higher speeds or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

I don't think child mortality in car crashes has decreased below gunshot deaths. There was a recent economist headline which suggested that gunshot deaths surpassed car accident deaths for young people, but they defined "young people" as 1-24 year olds so as to exclude infant mortality deaths on the low end of the age range and include gun deaths on the high end of the age range. The latter is the most important because those gun deaths were dominated by the 18-24 age range (and within that cohort, black males were driving the gun deaths). Further, it's not so much that car accident deaths decreased below gun deaths as much as gun deaths have increased--specifically, the gun death curve for "young people" mirrors the overall US homicide curve strongly suggesting that the increasing gun deaths among young people are also caused by the same thing as overall homicides: changes in policing over the last decade.

> the same thing as overall homicides: changes in policing over the last decade.

Not obvious to me that's the cause, or even the nature of the changes you are suggesting a) happened and b) are the cause. Citation?

Here's some copypasta from a recent comment I'd made on another forum, but there are half a dozen other studies that I could cite if I had the time:

> For nearly a year, Richard Rosenfeld’s research on crime trends has been used to debunk the existence of a “Ferguson effect”, a suggested link between protests over police killings of black Americans and an increase in crime and murder. ... “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-eff...

> From 2014 to 2019, Campbell tracked more than 1,600 BLM protests across the country, largely in bigger cities, with nearly 350,000 protesters. ... Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.

https://www.vox.com/22360290/black-lives-matter-protest-crim...

Famed Harvard economist Roland Fryer looked at cities that had a major BLM shooting and found a sharp increase in homicides and other felonies (900 additional homicides and 34k additional felonies over the course of a few months) compared with the same cities prior to their BLM shootings and compared with other cities which didn't have a BLM shooting. "The leading hypothesis for why these investigations increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the [police shooting] investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%."

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working\_papers/w27324/w27...

Hey thanks for the info. Food for thought.

However, I'd say from these that it's not clear that observed effects are the result of "changes in policing"; it's a hypothesis, sure, but not with close to the level of confidence you suggest.

The Vox article acknowledges this:

> This is where things get more speculative… We don’t know why BLM protests correlated with an increase in the murder rate, and there’s not a lot of research in this space to help guide us.

and also:

> The good news is that even if Campbell’s finding about the increase in murders following BLM protests holds up to further scrutiny, the effect doesn’t appear to last for long. By year four, Campbell no longer observes a statistically significant increase in murders,

The Guardian article:

> Even if the increase in homicide is significant, there are many competing theories for what may be responsible.

The nber.org URL does not resolve for me.

I guess it would be interesting to compare places with "police-involved shooting" that did NOT have major protests, with those that had such shootings and protests, if the hypothesis is that it was the protests that somehow resulted in... changes in policing... so actually, if the hypothesis is changes in policing, why not actually try to measure _changes in policing_ and correlate to homicide rate, instead of correlating protests and murders and assuming "changing in policing" resulted from the protests as an unmeasured middle step?

> However, I'd say from these that it's not clear that observed effects are the result of "changes in policing"; it's a hypothesis, sure, but not with close to the level of confidence you suggest.

Yes, because a lot of these studies were from the early days of the BLM riots. Things have solidified in the intervening half decade (although there's some uncertainty about how much of the 2020 surge is attributable to policing versus the pandemic, but I don't think anyone seriously doubts changes in policing played no role at all especially considering the homicide uptick begins promptly and dramatically after May 25, 2000). I don't think there are any remaining hypotheses (there is at least one niche hypothesis that is still a variant of the Ferguson effect--that the protests have caused communities to lose trust in police--but most studies refute it or find no evidence of it).

Here's the nber.org link again (I had to do some manual formatting edits when I copy/pasted, and I flubbed this link apparently): https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...

> f the hypothesis is that it was the protests that somehow resulted in... changes in policing... so actually, if the hypothesis is changes in policing, why not actually try to measure _changes in policing_ and correlate to homicide rate, instead of correlating protests and murders and assuming "changing in policing" resulted from the protests as an unmeasured middle step?

This is precisely what many of these studies do--they find reductions in policing and increases in murder rates. If you read the paragraph above the nber.org link, that's exactly what I describe.

Not just a simple murder/suicide, either, which frequently involves people who know each other. This is flat-out mass murder, terrorism, call it what you will. Killing hundreds of strangers would rank you at the top of any serial killer list.

We don’t have a lot of “what we’re you thinking?!” data on these pilots.

I think if you do this servile type of job for years, the passengers become the cattle the rest of of the industry treats them as. My guess (but I’m am not a suicide contemplating jumbo liner pilot), is that any signal from those doing this is against the job/industry itself as the stressor in the pilot’s life.

Perhaps we should avoid practices that dehumanize the pilot’s relationship with the cargo, er, uh, passengers. Maybe the stats say otherwise, but you don’t hear about a lot of tourist ride pilots (bush, etc) doing the in flight nose dive.

I’m curious how many pilots take their lives in more traditional means (e.g. just themselves).

The weird thing about that is, at least in my experience, passengers tend to idolize the pilot. I half expect the pilot sees passengers not as cattle, but as subjects ;-).

That’s what I don’t understand. Do they just ignore the passengers when they want to just commit suicide? Seems hard to believe a professional pilot would not have the passengers in mind. Otherwise you need someone who is both suicidal and with psychopathic murderous pulsions, which should be extremely rare. But clearly it’s not. Like for school shootings, I wonder how much one event inspires the next one.

Yes. Look up the German Wings case, flight 9525.

In short one pilot waited for the other to leave the cockpit, locked the door, and deliberately crashed the plane.

He was so suicidal and distraught (thought he was going blind and thus would lose his job) he was willing to do it.

If you read the full story it’s even sadder.

And just like school shootings, that German pilot studied MH370. The MH370 pilot likely did the same thing. He was separated from his wife & at his house they found he practiced the crash route on Microsoft Flight simulator.

Really? I didn’t know that part. I knew that psychiatrists had told him to stop flying while things were so bad, which he obviously ignored.

I didn’t know he had prepared like that though.

>> Preliminary evidence suggests the crash of a China Eastern Airlines Corp. jet in March may be the latest such tragedy, a person familiar with the investigation said.

What is the preliminary evidence? For this type of conclusion I would think the first and last bit of evidence would be the control inputs as recorded by the black box. Supporting evidence should be on the voice recording.

What is this "preliminary evidence"?

The video of the plane going down is enough to strongly suggest it. It was almost completely nose-down before it hit the ground, which is basically not going to happen without the pilot commanding it.

This is also (IIRC) how one recovers from a stall, so it could be a “malign” command, a best-effort at fixing a bigger problem, or anything in between.

There's nothing in the publicly-available flight data to suggest a stall. The flight was at cruising altitude when the descent started.

Stall recovery and intentional dives look very different.

1. In a stall recovery, you don't move the trim to the limit or move the throttles to idle and keep it there for tens of thousands of feet.

2. Planes don't want to keep going in a stable, near vertical dive. You have to force them into that position the entire way down. The flight path for stalls, breaking apart, and control problems are all shallower or slower.

You recover from a stall by relaxing back pressure, not by pushing nose down. If you're pushing when you stall, you're scaring your instructor. :)

You lower the nose to unload the wing and simultaneously increase power. That puts you a maximum a few degrees nose down, nothing like this incident's angle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_xupptkcso

This channel is anti-china propaganda, but they do some research and follow the news.

I don't read Chinese and can't provide you links, so treat this as very anecdotal. But here's what my (Chinese) wife tells me from their news.

It seems the co-pilot was very senior and experienced. But because of the politics of a corporate buyout, he was forever relegated to a supporting role. Job advancement, or even the recognition of his skills, was impossible. He was destined always to be in the right seat. He had complained to management multiple times and given them threats (I'm not sure what the nature of those threats were; likely just to quit?).

This came to a head with the crash of the Chinese real estate markets, where he'd had a lot of investment. Basically he lost everything.

The story - again, third hand at best by now - is that he left a note before embarking on that final flight.

The WSJ reported US officials saying it looked intentional based on black box data. The main alternative theory was that someone who wasn't a pilot deliberately did it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-eastern-black-box-points-...

Another fact is that the plane basically dove straight down. Even with catastrophic control failure, modern airliners just don’t do that.

Probably the other way around. There is a sensory illusion that occurs when accelerating that will induce a pilot to deliberately push nose down, sometimes aggressively. It's powerful - I've seen people do it. (And then quickly took over!) The Atlas crash a few years back was caused by this.

You don't really need evidence, you just read between lines - Chinese gov would use any opportunity to blame US company for the crash and since they kept quiet it's pretty clear it was human error/action.

And considering HOW the airplane crashed it's pretty clear it was intentional, you need to try really hard to crash straight down vertically (with intact airplane).

I haven't looked at their source data, but their graph is extremely suspect. They list zero "intentional deaths" from 2001-2010.

I seem to remember at least 1 large aviation murder-suicide event in that time period that resulted in a huge number of intentional deaths.

I think the point is that the Pilot in the title of that graph implies an on-shift airline pilot choosing to crash the plane intentionally, not a terrorist killing the pilot and grabbing the controls.

9/11 is excluded from the stats because it was not the pilots that caused the crashes, but the hijackers.

I think they only take into account intentional crashes caused by the original pilot of the plane, not by hijackings.

Considering more and more aircraft is fly by wire and most pilots get their "air time" in sims, is there not a advantage in building a mock cockpit at the back of the airline with a backup pilot to take over when other protocols are met?

All this is doing is highlighting how one person beit the president or prime minister of a country, judge's, GP's, practically anyone including a pilot can steal some or all of other people's lives to one degree or another.

Edit. Where I am going with this, is the Space Shuttle had 4 control systems and majority rule or agreement of the 4 control systems made things happen. I dont think more than 2 cockpits would necessary.

Another left field idea, is the cock pit doors could be engineered so that if enough people all pulled on a rope firmly attached to the cock pit door like a tug of war, in order to gain access to the cockpit, then maybe the passengers have a chance. However this relies on the passengers not being deceived by the pilot which is also what is troubling the air line industry and so called psychologists. When you can work out when you are going to lose your temper in the future, let the psychologists know, they might be able to study it....

It's all about tradeoffs. You could increase the number of pilots to hopefully reduce the number of these incidents, but the added complexity might increase other incidents and would reduce the capacity for paid passengers and increase the labor costs when there's already a shortage of qualified pilots willing to work for the airlines.

Same thing with the doors. They got strong locks and protocols to use them in response to rare events, but it makes other rare events harder to manage.

We generally live in a pretty trusting world, which enables many things, including violations of trust with major consequences.

> It's all about tradeoffs

Trade offs that we have to trust other people to make the right decisions and we only have to look at how people game the system for money, just look at Jeff Bezo for a prime example!

That chart of deaths looks fishy. It shows a lot more deaths from 2011-2020 than from 2021-2022. Which seems completely obvious. Of course there is more deaths in 10 years than there is in 1.5 years. Unless they intend to say "deaths per year", but that's not on the lable at least. Numbers for 2020 and 2021 are useless anyway due to reduced number of flights.

It looks like someone wants to push their political agenda.

Agenda or not, the whole point of the chart is to show that row with 132 deaths as a solid statistic. At the bottom of the same chart: "* Unconfirmed" in small print. Classic.

Why is it the whole point? The chat is about aviation fatality caused by pilot suicides, not to show “132 death as solid statistic”.

Also, the small print is “March 2022 China Eastern Crash is likely intentional, but unconfirmed”. You took out the important first part. The article has four paragraphs that discusses this specific event, yet you choose to go with a small print.

The label could have been “2020s so far” instead of “2021-2022” but the intention is quite clear, isn’t it? to show the death in the last four decades. Poor choice maybe. What is fishy about it?

> Numbers for 2020 and 2021 are useless anyway due to reduced number of flights.

As opposed to standstill air traffic after 9/11?

Is this an effort to reduce airline ticket demand?

It all comes down to the mental health stigma. Even hinting at the slightest bit of mental distress can be enough to lose your medical certificate and end your career. It's no wonder that the pilot population would be more susceptible to the consequences of untreated mental illness.

It's a catch-22 situation. You'd like to avoid unstable people to pilot the plane, but any atempt to filter out unstable people would lead to people hiding the condition and enduring untreated mental disease, what makes the situation worse. I don't see much to be done, beyond screening people that are entering the profession, and then ensuring the work conditions don't make people sick afterwards. When the Germanwings flight went down, I remember it was noticed the pilot was bullied at work. They should have cracked down on the bullies.

The easy solution is to allow doctors to make fit-for-flight decisions instead of the FAA.

If a doctor, or panel of flight doctors ok’s you to fly, then why does the FAA have final say?

I don’t care if my pilot has treated depression and a doctor says they are fine(currently an administrative disqualification). I very much care if my pilot is hiding/denying their depression and not getting care because they could lose their flight status.

The standard advice about getting a flight medical is to only answer what is asked and to volunteer nothing.

Absolutely. I ran into this as a new student pilot recently. Went in to get my medical thinking it would be a breeze, but my mention of going through a period of depression more than a decade ago (not diagnosed, just my layman's assessment at the time) and some more recent work-related anxiety was enough to get my medical deferred. This process will likely take me months to wade through, and this is only for a third-class medical (for a private pilot, not commercial)!

I filled out the form assuming the doctor would be free to exercise discretion and that it wouldn't be an issue, but it turns out the FAA wants all these kinds of responses referred to a small team in Oklahoma City who will eventually get through the backlog and review them.

It's not a very big deal for me; I just wanted to fly for fun, and can wait a few months. But for someone for whom this is a career, I can't help but imagine that there are lots of pilots out there that avoid seeking help so as not to jeopardize their career.

The article is terribly written and accusingly ambiguous with scope. This quote from the fine article is not better in the context of the article that it is here on its own:

  > While intentional acts traditionally aren’t included in air-crash
  > statistics, they would be the second-largest category of deaths
  > worldwide if they were, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Congress when will we have common sense airplane regulation to resolve this issue?

Wait, in their chart, 9.11 is not counted as intentional crash? What was it then?

It wasn't intentional by the airline pilots - it is usually classified as terrorism.

They're defining intentional crashes as those caused by the pilot. The 9/11 planes were hijacked and crashed by passengers.

The chart does not say so explicitely

The hijackers had done some training as pilots, but were not the pilots of the planes themselves.

A nose dive maneuver (and any that are clearly anomalous and dangerous) should require simultaneous action by the co-pilot as the likelihood of a double murder-suicide would be incredibly small.

For the majority of charter/private/business flights this wouldn't be feasible as the vast majority of flights tend to be single pilot ops.

Such a requirement could be for large passenger jets only.

Not possible. In an emergency situation that requires rapid descent, the last thing you'd want is to require both pilots to be on the controls.

Anomalous maneuvers are exactly those used to recover from stalls and the like.

Would it be possible to detect stalls and other situations that could override the copilot requirement?

I’m wondering what happens when the M/S death rate is 100x the stall death rate; would engineering controls would be added?

Yeah. You could even automate a response that commands the plane to pitch down so that it never stalls! (Changing flight controls around stall behavior is how Boeing 737 Max planes behaved.

In all seriousness, check out AF447. The plane crashed because the pilots were inputting different commands on the control stick and the plane picked the wrong one

Unfortunately a two man rule would negate the redundancy of having two pilots.

"Vexing" feels like the wrong adjective here. IMO, terrorism is not a "harumph" situation.

> Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to a murder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where the murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17750236/

The media has known about their role in inducing murder-suicides by reporting on them for decades, but they keep doing it.

As every evil act gets blasted worldwide instantaneously, one has to think that we as a culture need to put an end to publicizing the name/photo of the attacker. It's been proven enough times that it empowers others to do the same, for the fame and recognition of the "nobody".

There's already a voluntary ban on reporting suicides because of the copycat effect. That it hasn't been extended to murder-for-attention is reprehensible.

Some media organizations already do that, typically for school shootings or "homegrown terrorists".

I still remember this alleged quote from Germanwings co-pilot:

>According to the German newspaper Bild, a former girlfriend of Lubitz, identified only as Mary W, said he had told her last year: “One day I will do something that will change the whole system, and then all will know my name and remember it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/27/germanwings-co...

You can't solve a problem if no one is willing to vocalize and point out that there is one. Societal meta-awareness is a necessary pre-condition of change.

To be honest, I'm surprised there are not more Pilot death-by-suicides seeing as being able to fly is one of the most tightly and mercilessly regulated past times. Nevermind being able to make a living off it. For those for whom the wings are life, I can totally understand how having that jeopardized by a regulatory apparatus, and having the industrial apparatus that makes your living possible be hell bent on minimizing the number of you, could lead to a psychologically fraught population of specialists.

What'd be interesting is a study of whether the occupation has a markedly higher rate than say... Shipping/sailing, bus driving, or train operation. I just wonder if there may be a sub-correlation there with habitually being the Jesus Nut for massive numbers of people on a regular basis.

> You can't solve a problem if no one is willing to vocalize and point out that there is one. Societal meta-awareness is a necessary pre-condition of change.

I am reticent to discuss this matter at all since I doubt even delicate nuanced public discussion can help. But if you have data showing that public discussion about murder-suicides can reduce their incidence rate, I'd like to see it. As far as I can tell, public discussion makes it worse, but it's hard to warn people away from discussing it without yourself discussing it. Is it ethical for me to warn people away from discussing murder-suicides, if doing so necessarily means that I am discussing them? I'm not sure.

It should be a matter discussed privately among journalists. From what I understand, it is discussed in journalism schools but when push comes to shove they just don't care. If it bleeds, it leads.

I don't know what the right answer for the media outlets is here; if they didn't report on things like this, the contingent that are constantly shouting that "the main-stream media is hiding the truth from you" would get louder and have another bit of real evidence to underpin their conspiracy theories.

Given the choice between more deaths and noisier crazies, well, you don't have to listen to the crazies. Except when they get elected, I suppose.

I like how you jump directly to crazy from gp's "contigent of people saying the media is hiding the truth". Do you see how your response is part of the problem? Instead of addressing issues brought up, its just a label slap and then dismissal. Yeah there are real crazies who also say those things, but they are dwarfed by the amount of normal people who don't trust media and with many good reasons.

I have a feeling it was the mention of "conspiracy theories" having a modern intellectual connotation of ridiculous, but its a shame because conspiracy is a legal term and it happens all the time, and there is a lot of good analysis left on the chopping block due to mere association with similar sounding phrases and conspiracy theorists being enough to shut down thought on the matter.

>contigent of people saying the media is hiding the truth

Go start a media organisation, publish, go on social media, bring the truth to the people. Nobody will stop you. That's all just tosh. When I was a teenager here in the UK I used to be able to buy the English edition of Pravda in my local newsagents. In fact you can read the latest edition right now [0], thought it's a lot less risible these days.

Yes news organisations often have an agenda, but they're all different agendas and doing a complete end run around them has never been easier. Don't trust them. Do your own thing. The whole hiding the truth meme isn't even CS bull anymore, it's just stupid. The free world is awash with every conceivable opinion.

[0] https://english.pravda.ru/

None of that negates the truth that the media that has the most minds in it's capture hides the truth more often than not. Yes, the internet is a last bastion of anarchistic freedom of thought, which is why it also is under fierce attack by the oligarchs. There are a handful of true journalists and truth tellers on the internet, and their truth no matter how powerful generally gets shutdown and prevented from reaching the minds of others. On top of that recently there have been moves to regulate speech against the principles of freedom of speech. The very purveyors of disinfo are now claiming a right to govern disinfo. Alarm bells should be going off for everyone.

Class war is at play, and the non-.001% are losing.

Or maybe. Just maybe, the vast majority of people don’t see it that way, and genuinely don’t care about and don’t want to read or hear about the kind of fringe stuff you think is being ‘suppressed’.

I suppose that they could have something like the "some asshole" initiative[0], where they can report that a thing happened, and provide historical perspective and statistical analysis, but without identifying who carried out the attack, or what their motives were, or even who the victim(s) were other than "a fortune 500 CEO", or "a regional business owner".

They wouldn't be hiding any information. They'd still be reporting that the thing happened. A record of who died is still going to be available in the obituaries, or public FAA reports. The media just don't have to publicise the specific details that tend to inspire copycats.

...but they'd get fewer clicks/views, so it'll never happen :-(

[0] http://nonadventures.com/2015/06/20/the-some-of-all-fears/

This kind of thing always makes me think of the well-known Charlie Brooker (creator of Black Mirror) clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4

> The media has known about their role in inducing murder-suicides by reporting on them for decades, but they keep doing it.

The media probably induced the whole school shooting epidemic, with the massive attention paid to Columbine and the Columbine shooters.

The people have a right to know!

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