Tag Archives: suicide

On Pilots and the Sacred Trust

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A violation of trust, an act of murder.

Like most other frequent airline travelers, I was horrified to learn this morning that the cause of this week’s German Wings airplane crash in the French Alps is most likely the deliberate action of the “co-pilot” (i.e., First Officer), who locked the “pilot” (i.e., Captain) out of the “cockpit” (i.e., flight deck) and put the airplane into a steep descent that ended when it hit a mountain.

The only good thing to note about this is that men, women, and children on board likely never felt a thing as their lives were extinguished, like a candle’s flame between two calloused fingers.

As a pilot, this was more horrific to me. Why? Because the pilot who is responsible violated what I consider a sacred trust.

Let me try to explain. When I fly my helicopter, there is nothing more important to me than my passengers. By climbing aboard my aircraft, whether it’s for a 7-minute “hop ride” around town or a cross-country journey lasting hours, they have proven to me that they trust me with their lives. I don’t take that trust lightly. Maybe I pay closer attention to details, like the wind speed and direction or the way the helicopter lifts off the ground into a hover with their weight distribution. Maybe I fly a little higher, to reduce mechanical turbulence on a windy day and ensure that I’m well outside the “Deadman’s Curve” in the unlikely event of an engine failure. Maybe I keep my bank angle on turns a little flatter and my approaches and departures a little shallower to ensure a smooth flight.

I want my passengers to be not only safe, but comfortable. I want their memories of flying with me to include only the pleasant experiences they have during the flight.

I know a lot of pilots who don’t seem to think this way. Their goal is to impress their passengers with what they consider their flying skill. They want to give “E-Ticket rides.” For some reason, they think this is what their passengers want — and maybe some of them think they do.

But what passengers really want is to get off the aircraft in the same condition they got on it: safe, unharmed — and yes — alive.

And that’s what I call a sacred trust. The passengers trust the pilot to ensure their safety. If the pilot does anything to compromise that safety — whether it’s buzzing a backyard barbecue or diving into a mountain in France — he’s violated that sacred trust.

Pilots who even consider doing dangerous or suicidal things with passengers on board should not be in control of an aircraft.

Airplane
I’m about to get on this airplane for a flight from CA to WA. Do I need to worry about the mental state of the pilots?

As a pilot, I’m upset that a young German pilot decided to kill himself and the 149 people who trusted him with their lives in such a horrific act. I’m worried about what future passengers will think about their pilots’ mental state of mind. I’m worried that people will use this incident to fuel their fears of flying, to avoid flying altogether. I’m worried that the FAA or airline management or other authorities will enact knee-jerk rules and regulations — like the one that made cockpit doors impregnable — that further burden responsible pilots with tests and paperwork that add to their stress and workload.

Most of all, I’m angry about the half-informed media coverage and their “experts,” jumping to conclusions and exploring crazy conspiracy theories, grasping for someone to blame, instilling fears in viewers and listeners and readers.

Again.

Let’s get this straight: it’s all about a pilot who betrayed his passengers’ sacred trust.

This is not just suicide by airplane. This pilot committed murder, pure and simple. In doing so, he sullied the reputation of other professional pilots who take their responsibilities as a pilot seriously.

And that’s what upsets me most of all.

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28-Feb-15 Update: “Pilot Who Downed Airliner Vowed ‘To Do Something’ To Be Remembered” might shed some additional light on his state of mind.

One Solution for End of Life

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Choosing your time to die.

I went out to eat with a group of friends yesterday. These are like-minded folks I met on Meetup.com, Freethinkers. We meet monthly for dinner. During the summer months, we have potluck BBQs in a park along the Columbia River. Now that the weather has cooled down and days are shorter, we’ve taken our meetings indoors. We ate at Thongbai, a great Thai place in downtown Wenatchee, yesterday.

It was a great night out. I think there were at least 20 of us all seated around an L-shaped table in the back room. Lots of good conversation. But there was a pall hanging over some members of the group and it wasn’t until after we’d ordered our food that I discovered why: two of our members, an elderly couple, had killed themselves in late September.

Charles was 81; his wife Ruth was 97. Ruth had health and mobility problems and could not live without assistance. Charles may have had health problems, too. They’d moved out of their house and into a Wenatchee condo in 2011. In late September, Charles arranged his affairs and got into his car with Ruth in the condo’s garage. He used a semi-automatic handgun to kill Ruth before shooting himself.

After dinner, we discussed their deaths and our thoughts about the situation in some detail. One by one, we each offered up our own opinions. They were remarkably similar: we all believed that a person should have the right to end his/her own life when the quality of life deteriorates. What made us all sad was the violent method Charles had used. We wished they could have gone out together more peacefully, hand-in-hand while they drifted off to that last sleep.

Their situation really struck a chord with me. In October, my godfather was approaching the end of his life. His quality of life had faded to the point where he probably wouldn’t have considered it worth living. I went to visit him one last time, dreading the thought of seeing him a shadow of his former self but wanting to offer him some kind of comfort in his final days. But I didn’t get there fast enough; he died the day before I left Washington. As I wrote last week, I felt good that his suffering was limited and his death was relatively quick. He didn’t need to take action as Charles and Ruth had; I doubt he would have anyway. I was just glad that he didn’t have to suffer longer than necessary.

My friend sitting beside me at dinner last night had another suicide story. Today, she’s heading over the mountains to the Seattle area to attend the funeral of a 23-year-old girl who had taken her own life. No one knew why. She was young and pretty and had a lot going for her.

In my mind, I think about the differences in these people. Charles and Ruth, together their entire lives, facing the decline of body and mind that comes with old age. Making the decision to end their lives together before they’re too far gone to make that decision (and take action) for themselves. And this 23-year-old girl, with her whole life ahead of her, bowing out without trying to live. I can understand Charles and Ruth’s decision, but can’t understand the girl’s.

I’ve written about suicide more than once in this blog. It seems to be a topic I can’t avoid — I’ve been exposed to it more than what’s natural. The Conrail engineer’s stories about people who’d purposely stand or lie or park on the railroad tracks, knowing the train couldn’t stop. The suicide I witnessed back in 2004. The artist who hung himself in one of my rental apartments. The new tenant who killed herself before even moving in. The friend who dove into the five-story atrium at work. The cousin’s girlfriend who dove off the roof of her apartment building.

Every situation is different, every situation is tragic in its own way. Every situation makes me think hard about what was going on in their heads when they committed their final act.

But as for Charles and Ruth — although I’m sad about their demise, I understand their decision. They chose to die when they were ready.

Suicide, Revisited

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I get it now.

Back in August, 2010, I wrote a blog post about Suicide. I had just learned that a friend of mine from years before had taken his own life at work, leaving behind a wife and four daughters. At the same time, I was struggling to write a passage in a personal memoir about another suicide that had touched my life. I was trying hard to understand it all, trying to figure out why someone would take that drastic step and end his life.

I concluded then that people who commit suicide are selfish and cowardly. I concluded that the real “victims” of suicide are the people they leave behind.

I didn’t get it then.

I get now.

It’s all about relief — getting relief from feeling so miserable that you simply can’t go on.

I’ve glimpsed this feeling a few times over the past eight months. The first time was in August, when I first realized that the man I loved and trusted for more than half my life — my best friend, in many respects — had betrayed me by cheating on me and lying to me and planning to keep me out of my only home. I had no idea what was going on at home and my imagination took off with a wide range of worst-case scenarios. I had no way to find out what the truth was. The shock and grief I was suffering made it impossible to carry on my day-to-day living without breaking down into sobs at seemingly random times. My mind was caught up in the tragedy of the situation; it wouldn’t settle down. I was absolutely miserable — I cannot imagine being more miserable than I was.

My only relief was sleep, but because my mind couldn’t rest, I could only doze fitfully, never quite getting the relief I needed. This went on for days.

When I went to see a counselor for help, at the end of our first session, she gave me the phone number for the Suicide Prevention Hotline. She really thought that I might be at risk.

And that made me feel even worse.

Later, when my mind cleared a bit and I was able to look back objectively at that week in my life, I understood why some people turn to the final solution for all their problems. They just want relief.

I should mention here that this is probably also why so many people turn to drugs or alcohol. I’m a pilot and I can’t take drugs and I was on standby duty at the time so I couldn’t even drink. But if I could, I probably would have turned to either one for the relief I so desperately needed. I think a lot of people do. It’s sad; this is clearly the way so many addictions get started. The substance offers the relief a person so desperately needs. But the substance is not a permanent solution, and repetitively taking drugs or alcohol for relief will likely do more harm than good. It certainly won’t make the cause of the problem go away.

Why a person feels so miserable that they turn to suicide for relief depends on that person and what’s going on in his life. There might be psychological factors; the man who killed himself by jumping out of the tour helicopter I was flying back in 2004 had a history of problems, was on medication, and had even tried to kill himself with a knife five months before. I don’t know the details of my old friend’s situation, but I have to assume he was under a lot of stress at home — or more likely at work, where he did the deed — and perhaps had other psychological issues that came into play. For these people, suicide was the relief they so desperately needed.

In my original blog post on this topic, I said that people who committed suicide were selfish. I now don’t think that’s entirely true. I think that they’re so overwhelmed with their own misery that they simply can’t think about others. I think that when a person takes his own life, he’s only thinking about one thing: how he’ll finally make his suffering end. At that point, nothing else matters.

Suicide is a horrible thing — and it’s not the answer. Getting to the root cause of your misery and finding solutions to make things better might be more difficult than simply giving up, but it’s ultimately more worthwhile. Not just for you, but for the people who care about you.

If you’re reading this because you’ve considered suicide, do yourself a favor and get the help you need. Life is worth living; you can get past your problems and see that for yourself again.

Suicide

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Some thoughts.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about suicide.

No, not me. I’m perfectly happy living my life until something else — preferably something quick and painless that occurs years and years from now — ends it.

It’s others.

Writing about Suicide

Here’s the situation.

I’m working on a memoir and one of the things that falls into the scope of the book is a suicide that touched my life in an unusual way. I need to write about it because it’s part of the story of that part of my life, but it’s difficult. The event was very dramatic to the point of being sensationalist. I don’t want to give readers the idea that what happened should be copied by any other sad sack who can’t cope. I want readers to understand the impact of this suicide on me and others. I want them to understand that what happened was wrong.

I refuse to refer to a person who died by suicide as a “suicide victim.” The victim is not the person who ended his own life. The victims are the people left behind, the ones tortured by memories of something they had no choice about witnessing. The victims are the people left to wonder, for the rest of their lives, why it happened or whether they could have prevented it. These are the victims of suicide.

So I’ve been thinking about it, trying to come up with a way to write about it.

I know what I want to say: that suicide is for selfish cowards.

Strong words, but when you’ve seen what witnessing a suicide can do to people, you can’t help but recognize the selfishness of the person committing suicide. A suicide doesn’t think about the people who see him cut his life short, often by violent means. He doesn’t think about the people — perhaps even a spouse or child — who find him dead, often in a grizzly state. He doesn’t think about the effect his suicide has on others — emotionally, financially, socially. Not thinking about others is the definition of selfishness.

Coward is a little tougher. The suicide that touched my life was a troubled man with diagnosed psychological problems. He’d tried once before. He was off his meds. Maybe he wasn’t a coward. Maybe his head was so fucked up that he just didn’t know any better. I try to think of him that way. It makes it a little easier to bear.

But it doesn’t do anything for the resentment I feel about being dragged into his final act.

The Others

I was lucky. The artist who committed suicide in the apartment building I owned wasn’t discovered hanging from the light fixture by me. It was his ex-wife. And the police kindly cleaned up after they took away his body, leaving only the smell of disinfectant and his oil paints.

And that woman I rented an apartment to the following year? She killed herself before moving in. I had a heck of a time figuring out how to get her deposit back to someone.

Today

Today, I learned that a friend of mine from 20+ years ago committed suicide at work on Friday. We hadn’t seen each other in at least 20 years, but we kept in touch, on and off, on Facebook and Twitter. His Facebook picture shows him at a ball game, smiling up at the camera. He used to tweet about sports like it was a driving force in his life.

A mutual friend I spoke to today agreed that he was always cheerful and never seemed to be unhappy. Neither of us can figure out why he might have taken his own life. We’ll likely never know. We’re not close enough to the family to make contact and ask. So we’re left to wonder.

And I think about my choice of words to generalize all suicides: selfish coward.

And I hate to apply those words to my old friend.

But what else can I think? He did the deed at work — for Pete’s sake! — in the middle of a weekday. The company has brought in grief counsellors to deal with coworkers. He left behind a wife and four daughters. One of the girls was starting college this semester. Didn’t he think of all these people as he prepared to end it all? Couldn’t he imagine how they would feel? Didn’t he care?

And what could possibly be so bad that a 46-year-old man with a job and home and wife and family would kill himself over? Whatever it was, couldn’t he face it? Couldn’t he deal with it, with the support of his family and friends, to move past the difficulties and get on with his life?

Selfish coward. I hate to think of him that way.

Help Me Understand

I don’t want to think about suicide. I want to think about flying and eating cherries and doing a photo shoot at Lake Powell. I want to worry a little about my dog, who needs some surgery, and my sister, who moved back in with my Mom last November. I want to finish up this big pile of work on my desk so I can write some invoices and take a few days off. I want to look forward to my husband’s brief visit next week, which will be the first time I’ve seen him since May. I want to go out to eat something I’ve never eaten before.

I don’t want to think about how I can write about a suicide that touched me while thinking about the suicide of an old friend.

Can someone help me understand?

I don’t want pity. I just want to understand why it happens and how I can write about it without offending the real victims: the people left behind.

On Accidents That Aren’t Accidents

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How I’m spared from being the victim of the government’s bureaucracy.

If you read my jumper story (in an earlier entry of this blog) and you know anything about the FAA and NTSB and the rules and regulations they operate under, you might be wondering why they hadn’t classified the event as an “accident.”

Unfortunately, they did.

If you search the NTSB’s Web site for accident reports, using the word “suicide” as a search word, you’ll find one case very similar to mine. In that case, the jumper went up with a CFI and dove out during a steep turn that he’d requested. Although the CFI was not at fault — heck, the passenger committed suicide! — the case was classified as an accident.

And my case was going the same way.

Papillon fought back. Not just for me, but for them, too. They didn’t want an accident on their record any more than I did. Although the event met the definition of an accident (which really needs to be revised, in my opinion), common sense says that the word “accident” does not apply to a suicide. There was nothing accidental about it. (The guy purposely undid his seatbelt, pushed his door open against a 100-knot wind, and jumped.) The trick was to get the NTSB to disregard their definition and classify this as something less damaging to the pilot’s or operator’s flight records.

It went all the way to Washington, involving people from the FAA, NTSB, Department of the Interior, and HAI. I even tried to get AOPA involved, but they lamely claimed that you couldn’t fight NTSB on its accident definition. (Good thing I didn’t pay for their legal services plan.) Someone must have talked sense to the bureaucrats, because the other night I got a voicemail message with the good news: they’d changed the classification from accident to something else. What that something else is is still a question. I’ll find out tomorrow.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s this: don’t let a passenger jump out of your helicopter. Not only is it a traumatic experience, but it results in a ton of paperwork.