A disturbing trend has emerged in airline pilot deaths.

It's time to investigate.

Airline pilots are dying younger, and apparently in greater numbers recently. I first started looking into airline pilot deaths when false claims started circulating on the internet that airline pilot deaths increased by more than 1000% since the mandate of the covid shot. I knew the claims were false because of how deaths are reported in the ALPA magazine, the source of the screenshot that flew around. The Air Line Pilot Association magazine has a section called “In Memoriam” that publishes the names of pilots that have died. The magazine does not publish all airline pilot deaths, only the ones that families of the deceased will allow, and only those that belonged to the Air Line Pilots Association that currently represents about 77,000 pilots in the US and Canada. Many of these deaths are published months or even years after they occurred, and they are not cumulative. For example, in the September/October issue of 2021, there was 1 death reported from 2019, 6 from 2020, and 111 in 2021 so far. This can make it look to the unknowing eye that pilot deaths exponentially increased in 2021. The down to earth cumulative numbers through the March 2024 magazine show 467 deaths in 2019, 491 in 2020, and 513 in 2021. Therefore, the published deaths in 2021 were about 7% more than in the two previous years.

I have every pilot death that was listed in the ALPA magazine since January of 2019, tied to obituaries that verify the named person was in fact a pilot for that airline, their date of birth, their date of death, the age at death, and sometimes the reason for the death. None of that information is published in the magazine. The only information given is the name, the airline they flew for, and the month and year of their passing. Collecting the needed additional information takes a significant amount of work and time. I have it available in an excel spreadsheet to anyone who wants it by sending an email request to kevinstillwagon@cs.com.

What became evident in my research was a 40% increase in the incidence of pilots dying before their normal retirement age of 65. This increase began in 2021 after the shot was illegally mandated into airline pilots starting in December of 2020. This data aligns with reports from insurance companies that show the same increase in death benefit payouts among people of working age in America.

The new trend that recently showed up is alarming. I noticed that in the March 2024 “In Memoriam” section, 13 of the 36 deaths that were reported for January and February of 2024 were under the age of 65. Even though this is a small sampling, that is 36%, and seemed high. I went back and looked at each March issue for each year starting in 2019 to see what the percentage was for January and February of those years. Overall, in the years 2019 to 2023, the result was significantly lower at an average of 24.7%. However, just looking at the March issues for each year is not cumulative because as the later issues come out, delayed deaths for January and February get reported. So, using the cumulative database I have compiled, the January/February incidence of early deaths was only 18% averaged over 2019 through 2023. The highest percentage was in 2021, as expected due to the cumulative yearly data that shows a 40% jump that year.

I don’t have access to real time pilot death data across all airlines world-wide. I can only report what I see published in the ALPA magazine. As delayed deaths get backfilled for January/February, perhaps they will be older pilots and the 36% average will drop. There is no way for me to know, but I do know this: Obituaries rarely mention the causes of death, and I am seeing “short battles with cancer” mentioned more often.

Who would have thought that getting a shot to try to lessen the severity of covid symptoms could end up causing cancer? The potential for this to happen was always there, but became evident when scientists started looking to see what was in the vials after millions of shots already went into unsuspecting and trusting people, including pilots. What they found was DNA fragment contamination and promoter genes that can integrate the fragments into cell lines and potentially cause cancer. They also found out that the shot causes an overexpression of PD-L1. PD-L1 is the ligand on tumor cells that will attach to PD-1 receptors on immune cells. The PD-1/PD-L1 interaction turns off the immune cell attack on the cancerous cell, allowing the cancer to rapidly spread (turbocancer). They also found out that the shot retrains and focuses immune T-cells on what was injected, lessening their ability to detect cancer cells, which is one of their main functions. It takes a while for things like this to show up in post marketing experience, and that is EXACTLY why the guidance for aeromedical examiners recommends waiting a full year after any drug has been approved before it can be administered to pilots.

What was done to pilots is criminal and needs to be fully investigated. Please join www.usfreedomflyers.org and donate if you can so that we can accomplish this goal, make sure it never happens again, and help crew members who were injured.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for staying smart.

Kevin Stillwagon
Vice President, US Freedom Flyers