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Suicide risk demands pilot scrutiny

It is a chilling trend - pilot suicide.

Although rare, it has happened at least nine times in the past 40 years and claimed 556 lives. Tragically, seven pilots have deliberately crashed planes in the past 20 years.

It is time for the airline industry to look seriously at this issue with more profiling of pilots.

There will be howls from pilots about the invasion of their privacy but travellers have a right to know about the mental health of pilots or at least know preventive measures are in place.

Airlines should consider a rule - as Malaysia Airlines has introduced after the MH370 disaster - of having a flight attendant occupy the cockpit when one pilot needs to take a break.

The worst pilot suicide was the loss of EgyptAir flight 990 that killed 217 passengers and crew in 1999. And pilot suicide is accepted within the industry as the most probable cause of the disappearance of MH370 with 239 lives.

The first case to be documented as a pilot suicide was in 1976 when a Russian pilot stole a plane and flew it into the block of flats in Novosibirsk where his divorced wife lived.

That action took 12 lives.

In 1979 a 23-year-old mechanic who had just been fired entered a hangar at Bogota airport in Colombia and stole a military transport plane. He crashed it into a residential area killing four people.

One of the most tragic suicides was the crash of Silk Air flight 195 in 1997.

The Boeing 737 en route from Jakarta, Indonesia to Singapore, crashed killing 104.

Although Indonesian authorities were unable to determine the cause of the accident, the US crash investigator laid the blame with the captain.