A pilot's suspected attempt to crash a Boeing 737 MAX bound for Israel shows how one of aviation's biggest safety threats is in the cockpit.
As commercial flying has become safer, the death toll from suspected intentional crashes increasingly stands out. At least 800 people worldwide have died since 2005 in airline crashes that have been suspected by U.S. government officials or confirmed to be intentionally caused by pilots, according to accident data.
Disasters that current and former U.S. officials believe resulted from deliberate pilot actions include a 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared over the southern Indian Ocean, a 2022 China Eastern Airlines crash in southern China, and a 2025 Air India crash in western India. Local investigators of the crashes haven't reached the same conclusion as American officials or released their final investigative findings.
One crash that is officially accepted as a deliberate act is a 2015 Germanwings crash in the French Alps.
Airlines, regulators and aerospace manufacturers have worked to stamp out deadly accidents resulting from overshooting runways, mistakenly flying into terrain or failures in aircraft structures.
Around the world, flying has increased 37% over the past two decades, according to aviation data firm Cirium. Meanwhile, the number of commercial aviation fatalities fell globally from 2005 to 2025 by 35%, according to accident data. The U.S. had a more than 15-year streak without a major fatal passenger airline crash before a midair collision last year in Washington, D.C.
Advances in training and modern airliners' technological safeguards can only do so much when screening for potential rogue pilots falls short, aviation security and safety experts said.
"The airplane's going to do what it's told," said John Cox, an aviation safety consultant and former pilot union official.
Inside Boeing, executives have privately discussed the threat of intentional crashes as a leading source of commercial aviation fatalities, according to people familiar with the matter. The company has considered the risk as its engineers design a next-generation airplane, some of the people said.
If a faulty cockpit system or mechanical problem had led to several fatal accidents, it would have set off widespread alarm and spurred drastic action, said Thomas Anthony, director of the aviation safety and security program at the University of Southern California.
"People would have been running around with their hair on fire," he said.
Gauging the threat these rare but highly lethal cases pose has been hard to officially track. In some cases, a major hurdle has been a lack of official agreement on what caused the crashes.
Malaysian authorities issued a final report in 2018 for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crash, saying they couldn't determine why the flight went off course and couldn't rule out a hijacker. A spokesman for Malaysia's transport ministry said he had no new information about the accident's cause.
Chinese officials investigating the China Eastern accident haven't released a final report and didn't respond to requests for comment.
With the Air India incident, an Indian pilot group disputes the theory that pilot actions led to the crash. India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau has said it is committed to an "objective and evidence-based investigation."
Middle Eastern authorities have said the suspected rogue pilot on the FlyDubai flight on Sept. 30 held extremist views. Authorities identified him as Hamam al-Hammami and alleged that he attacked his captain with an emergency ax and attempted to down the airliner. Hammami told investigators he sought out airlines and routes that would take him to Israel, and he nearly carried out the attack in July, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Authorities are reviewing potential security failures that enabled Hammami to work the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv.
Controlling the cockpit
A foundational principle in commercial aviation is that the pilots should have the ultimate authority over an airplane's operation.
But after the terrorist hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. government and industry officials quickly sought technology to prevent deliberate attempts to crash planes.
President George W. Bush later that month vowed to pursue fixes like fortifying cockpit doors and "technology to enable controllers to take over distressed aircraft and land it by remote control."
Boeing and companies like Honeywell studied technology that could override pilot commands. "Aircraft should 'refuse to be destroyed,'" Don Bateman, the late Honeywell engineer, once told an industry magazine.
But remote-landing systems never became a reality on passenger planes. One concern: the systems risked being hacked.
Boeing in 2006 patented an "uninterruptible autopilot" that, once activated, couldn't be overridden in the cockpit. The aerospace giant said it never installed the system on its commercial aircraft.
Work on automated safeguards continued, with ground-collision avoidance systems later ending up in some U.S. fighter jets
In recent years, Airbus developed plans to allow aircraft to rely on a single pilot at cruising altitude so other pilots could rest.
U.S. and European pilot groups and American regulators, as well as Boeing, met the Airbus plan with skepticism. Senior Boeing executives discussed the potential vulnerability of a rogue pilot being alone in the cockpit, according to people familiar with the discussions.
"That's a huge risk," said Mike Whitaker, who led the Federal Aviation Administration during the Biden administration. "That is the reason why the whole concept fails."
Airbus said it supports a two-pilot cockpit and plans to use technology to make flying safer.
Boeing has said its next new aircraft will be designed around having two pilots in the cockpit. And while Boeing plans to give pilots the final say over how the new plane flies, people familiar with the matter said, the aircraft's advanced computers are expected to accommodate new automated safeguards that could make it harder to accidentally crash -- or do so intentionally.
Boeing declined to discuss intentional crashes. The company said it supports legislation focused on addressing pilot mental health, which recently advanced in Congress.
Pilot actions under observation
Pilot mental health received a lot of attention after the Germanwings crash in 2015. In that incident, the first officer locked his captain out of the flight deck during a bathroom break and deliberately flew an Airbus A320 into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board.
A few weeks before the crash, he experienced an apparent psychosis, was recommended hospital treatment and was prescribed several medications. German privacy laws kept his doctor from alerting aviation authorities, who otherwise might have intervened, according to French authorities' report on the crash.
The Germanwings tragedy fueled a push by regulators, industry officials and advocates to reduce barriers for pilots to seek mental health treatment. Airlines started peer support networks for pilots, and the European Union began requiring doctors to report pilots' severe mental health issues to authorities.
To prevent nightmare scenarios, regulators and advocates say the key is to first reduce the stigma around mental health and reduce the threat of pilots' losing their income or license if they seek help.
The FAA said it is modernizing its approach to mental health, which critics have called outdated and punitive. Pilots are now able to fly while taking a greater number of psychiatric drugs, for example, and the agency has reduced the time pilots have to wait to resume flying after seeking treatment.
"We hope by making it faster, more people will come forward and get the treatment that they need," Dr. Susan Northrup, the FAA's federal air surgeon who oversees pilot medical certification, said in August.
Authorities probing last year's Air India calamity said in court filing they were examining a range of factors, including by conducting a "psychological autopsy and evaluation." A draft final report was expected to be complete this month. The government entity overseeing the investigation didn't comment.
The case of FlyDubai has meanwhile exposed how even when a pilot is deemed unfit to fly, the system can fall short. Hammami, the first officer on Flight 1073 had been banned from flying two years earlier by his former employer, Oman Air, assigned to a deradicalization program and given a desk job.
He left the airline last year before re-emerging in February as a new recruit at the rapidly expanding Dubai carrier where he would be assigned, several times, to the most sensitive route in the region.
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