It’s sad to read about what (probably, most likely) happened to MH370, the Malaysian airliner that went missing in 2014. Don’t read on if you don’t want to know. Okay…what really probably happened according to The Atlantic is that the pilot, who had a history of mental illness, locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit, intentionally depressurized the plane and climbed to 40,000 feet, which would have caused everyone onboard to lose consciousness and die painlessly in their sleep, repressurized and reheated the plane, then flew for thousands of miles towards Antarctica before diving into the ocean. Disturbing, hard to explain, but there it is.

I learned a few things from this article. First, 40,000 feet is about as high as commercial airliners can go. Second, the oxygen masks provided to passengers are meant to last only about 15 minutes, long enough for the pilots to perform an emergency descent to below 13,000 feet, where there is enough air and it is warm enough for people to breathe without them. Meanwhile, the pilots have pressurized air tanks and masks that can last for hours, if needed. Finally, crazy pilots do occasionally crash planes on purpose, so you can add that to your list of things to worry about if you are looking for something new.

In 1997, a captain working for a Singaporean airline called SilkAir is believed to have disabled the black boxes of a Boeing 737 and to have plunged the airplane at supersonic speeds into a river.* In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately crashed into the sea by its co-pilot off the coast of Long Island, resulting in the loss of everyone on board. In 2013, just months before MH370 disappeared, the captain of LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 flew his Embraer E190 twin jet from cruising altitude into the ground, killing all 27 passengers and all six crew members. The most recent case is the Germanwings Airbus that was deliberately crashed into the French Alps on March 24, 2015, also causing the loss of everyone on board. Its co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had waited for the pilot to use the bathroom and then locked him out. Lubitz had a record of depression and—as investigations later discovered—had made a study of MH370’s disappearance, one year earlier.

Atlantic

That’s about five intentional crashes in 20 years, or one every four years on average, if I am doing the math right.