In the cases where it seems that the pilot intentionally crashed the plane because of depression or ideological reasons, wouldn't those conversations help to elucidate why the pilot took such action?
According to Wikipedia "Suicide by pilot", intentional pilot crashes are the second leading cause of airplane crashes. That's kind of scary.
>In the cases where it seems that the pilot intentionally crashed the plane because of depression or ideological reasons, wouldn’t those conversations help to elucidate why the pilot took such action?<
No.
The suicidal pilot will leave a long trail of evidence and/or utter something in the last moments before the crash.
Commercial aviation has become so incredibly safe we are not talking about a lot of suicides. Besides, there are so many possible causes to choose from that this stat is not a surprise at all.
Let’s imagine all cars had a 25 hour recording device. Every time a cop pulled you over he could do a look back of 25 hours to decide if he wants to write you another ticket that you will have to defend in court. Now do you understand the push back from the pilots?
EC
Remember how that math works. 2nd place doesn’t mean it happens often, just that it happened the 2nd most often. If there’s 3 plane crashes all year, 2 are equipment failure and 1 is suicide by pilot that makes sbp 2nd most often.