Chinese officials said on Thursday that the 66-year-old pilot who flew his plane into a Beijing skyscraper on June 26 wanted to commit suicide, according to entries in his diary. Thirteen other people were allegedly injured in the crash.
The crash occurred at the CITIC tower in downtown Beijing, a 109-story skyscraper also known as “China Zun” because its shape resembles an ancient wine vessel known as a zun. Completed in 2018, it is the tallest building in Beijing and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future due to building ordinances.
At around 6:00 p.m. local time last Friday, a small two-seater, single-engine training plane slammed into the CITIC tower, punching a hole in its glass side. An astonished crowd watched the wrecked plane tumble like a leaf to the streets below:
A statement from Beijing’s Chaoyang district government said the plane took off normally from an airport in the Pinggu district near Beijing but then deviated from the strict airspace controls around the city and broke off radio communications. The pilot had allegedly already conducted several training flights that day, without incident.
After conducting a “comprehensive investigation,” the Chaoyang government said on Thursday that the crash was “a case of endangering public safety caused by personal reasons.”
Investigators said the pilot, a 66-year-old man identified only by his surname “Liu,” was a divorced freelancer who lived alone and kept a diary. He earned a sport pilot’s license in 2021 and a full private pilot’s license in 2024.
Liu’s diary reportedly included “multiple expressions of ending his life.” Officials said he suffered from insomnia and anxiety but released few other details about his background or state of mind on the day of the crash.
The incident was a massive embarrassment for the Chinese government, as the capital city has a closely regulated airspace. On May 1, the rules were tightened even further to effectively ban the use of drones without express approval from the government. Eyewitnesses to the crash said it was very unusual to see a plane flying directly over the city.
In a pattern all too familiar from the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Chinese officials initially denied that any sort of emergency occurred in Beijing on June 26, then set about scrubbing all photos and video of the plane crash from China’s heavily censored social media.
Chinese state media offered zero coverage of the crash until the next day, even though state media organs are literally headquartered across the street from the CITIC tower. Bemused social media users noted that some of the images scrubbed from the Internet were so clear that the registration number on the plane could be made out, allowing them to identify the aircraft before the government admitted there had been a crash.
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