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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

The more certain it seems that MH370 was a murder-suicide scenario, the less comfortable I am with the media's preoccupation with it. News reports about such events may contribute to copycats: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17750236/

> Airplane accident fatalities increase just after newspaper stories about murder and suicide D P Phillips. Science. 1978.

> Abstract: 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.

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The most effective publicity ever for a form of murder-suicide must be the "active shooter" training in US schools.

This. Everyone knows active shooter situation = teachers close blinds and turn off the lights. You aren’t fooling anyone.

There have been other murder/suicides of this kind (assuming that the theory is correct). Particularly SilkAir 185 and Germanwings 9525 (I think there is at least another one, but at the moment it is escaping me). In fact, my impression has been, for a long time, that MH370 is itself a copycat of SilkAir 185 where the suicide corrected the mistakes that led to the discovery that the accident was in fact caused by the captain.

I'm not particularly concerned about this, after the germanwings incident in europe and US (and possibly everywhere else as well) flight decks are required to always have at least two people: if one of the pilots wants or needs to leave one of the flight attendants must take his place.

Wikipedia says this was walked back, unfortunately.

> Aviation authorities swiftly implemented new recommendations from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency that required two authorised personnel in the cockpit at all times but, by 2017, Germanwings and other German airlines had dropped the rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

That's a bit of a conundrum; on the one side the families of the victims have a right to know, and having free press is a good thing. On the other, reporting on these things may lead to copycats.

There already was a copycat, the German wings flight that flew into a mountain. Or did that precede MH370?

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