I’m not thinking here of terrorist attacks that down the whole plane, but good old-fashioned murders, conducted one-on-one between a killer and his chosen victim.
Has there ever been a real life murder like that and, if so, when was the first? Better yet, has there ever been such a case which remained unsolved and killer was never identified?
Even that doesn’t really help, because the killer went on to attack the flight deck, and that led to the whole plane crashing. I’m sure there’s been plenty of fictional examples of the scenario I’m describing in here, but has it ever happened in real life?
I should add that the BBC has just shown a documentary about the first ever murder on board a train (London, 1864), and that’s what got me thinking about the modern equivalent.
It was a cargo flight, but you might be interested in FedEx 705, a DC-10 that suffered an attempted hijacking when a disgruntled employee attacked the crew mid-air with a hammer and a spear gun (!). Eventually the crew subdued him, but were so badly injured they could never fly again.
Courtesy of Wikipedia (and TV Tropes), Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, a Colombian guerrila leader, was killed on an airplane. A political assassination (and the shooter didn’t get away with it, nor did the instigator of the hit, so no unsolved mystery).
Not quite what you’re looking for, but there was also Southwest Airlines Flight 1763, in which an unruly passenger was killed (via asphyxiation) by a group of passengers trying to subdue him.
Not quite what you’re looking for either but somewhat relevant, Ninoy Aquino was assasinated on a crowded airport tarmac as soon as he returned to the Philippines, while he had a crew of Bodyguards and was being filmed, and still there is controversy over who shot him and we will likely never know.
I think you will be hard-pressed to find a “traditional” murder in a locked room full of potential witnesses which is essentially what a plane in flight is.
TV Tropes gets it wrong, BTW. It lists Agatha Christie’s 1935 Death in the Clouds (UK title: Death in the Air) as the first fictional example. But Stuart Palmer wrote The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree, a Hildegarde Withers mystery, in 1933. It was filmed in 1935 as Murder on a Honeymoon with Edna May Oliver as a delightful Hildy.
In both books, poison is the weapon so there is no danger of the other passengers spotting the murderer in action.
Based on extensive reading and television watching, there is at least one murder on every airline flight. For some reason even though there is almost no place to hide on a plane, there are generally no witnesses and it requires the skills of the world’s greatest detectives, who coincidentally are always on these flights, to solve the crime. Which they always do before the plane lands.
*Death in the Clouds * was apparently the original UK title, although the novel was first published in the US as * Death in the Air . *. A Death in the Clouds book cover was shown in Doctor Who episode “The Unicorn and the Wasp.”
Now to find Hildegard Withers…never read her books.
You’re in luck that you’re doing it now. The Rue Morgue Press reprinted a number of her books in the last decade in paperback. Before that her mysteries were probably the hardest to find of any major Golden Age detective. In fact, as far as I can tell, The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree was literally never reprinted before the Rue Morgue edition. That may be unique for any series detective, especially one who spawned a half dozen 30s films. The better books have fun screwball humor but they’ve dated very badly.
And they always solve the murder without bothering any of the other passengers on board, since I’ve been on countless flights and have never noticed an on-going murder investigation. And I rarely sleep on planes.