Death flights (Spanish: vuelos de la muerte) are a form of extrajudicial killing in which victims are dropped to their deaths from airplanes or helicopters and their bodies land in oceans, large rivers or mountains. Death flights have been carried out by governments during a number of internal conflicts, including France during the 1947 Malagasy Uprising in Madagascar and the 1957 Battle of Algiers, and the junta dictatorship which ruled Argentina and waged the Argentine Dirty War between 1976 and 1983. During the Bougainville conflict, PNGDF helicopters were used to dispose of corpses of detainees who had died under torture, and in some cases, still-living victims.

During the 1976–1983 Argentine Dirty War, many thousands of people disappeared, having been clandestinely kidnapped by groups acting for the dictatorship. According to the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons 8,961 persons disappeared between 1976 and 1983. Human rights groups in Argentina often cite a figure of 30,000 disappeared; Amnesty International estimates 20,000. Many were killed in death flights, a practice initiated by Admiral Luis María Mendía, usually after detention and torture. Typically they were drugged into a stupor, loaded into an aircraft, stripped, and dropped into the Río de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean.

According to the testimony of Adolfo Scilingo, a former Argentinian naval officer convicted in Spain in 2005 for crimes against humanity under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, there were 180–200 death flights during 1977 and 1978. Scilingo confessed to participating in two such flights, during which 13 and 17 people were killed, respectively. Scilingo estimated that the Argentine Navy conducted the flights every Wednesday for two years, 1977 and 1978, killing 1,500 to 2,000 people.

Victims were sometimes made to dance for joy in celebration of the freedom they were told awaited them. In an earlier 1996 interview, Scilingo said, "They were played lively music and made to dance for joy, because they were going to be transferred to the south. ... After that, they were told they had to be vaccinated due to the transfer, and they were injected with Pentothal. And shortly after, they became really drowsy, and from there we loaded them onto trucks and headed off for the airfield." At the time, Scilingo said that the Argentine Navy was "still hiding what happened during the Dirty War".

In May 2010, Spain extradited pilot Julio Alberto Poch to Argentina. Born in 1952, Poch had been arrested in Valencia, Spain, on September 23, 2009, and was wanted in Argentina for his alleged participation as a pilot on the death flights. At his trial in February 2013, Poch denied that he had participated in the death flights, claiming everything he knew about them came from what he had read. After spending eight years in an Argentine jail, Poch was found not guilty by a court in Buenos Aires.

In April 2015, further arrests were made. It was reported that the death flights had started before 1976, and continued until 1983. To carry out the flights, a military unit, Batallón de Aviación del Ejército 601 (Army Air Battalion 601), was set up, with a commander, sub-commander, chief of staff, and officers from five companies. Soldiers who refused to take part, as well as others who acted as airfield guards and runway cleaners, testified they had seen live people and corpses loaded onto aircraft; after taking off, the planes returned empty.

On 12 March 2016, Interpol, through the National Police of Colombia, arrested Juan Carlos Francisco Bossi in the city of Medellín. Also known as El doctor, Bossi was accused of activating the death flights during the Dirty War and was wanted by Argentine authorities for taking part in death flights and forced disappearances of over 30,000 people. After his arrest, Bossi confessed to the Colombian authorities to being responsible for the deaths of 6,000 individuals.

Meanwhile, in 2003, Italian photographer Giancarlo Ceraudo had become intrigued by the death flights and, with the assistance of the investigative journalist Miriam Lewin, began looking for the aircraft that had been used. Lewin was a survivor of the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), which was one of the dictatorship's most notorious detention, torture and extermination centres. They believed that PNA - Argentina Naval Prefecture Short SC.7 Skyvans were among the aircraft that had participated in the death flights. By this time, the PNA had lost two Skyvans in the Falklands War, and had sold the remaining three. In 2010 Ceraudo and Lewin eventually tracked down one of these remaining Skyvan aircraft (serial number 'PA-51') to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where it was owned by GB Airlink, whose then owner allowed a Miami-based Argentinian sports journalist acting on their behalf to visit the aircraft and also provided all its flight logs, among which was one covering the period of the death flights. A three-hour flight entry on 14 December 1977 led to the identification and 2017 conviction of pilots, Mario Daniel Arrú and Alejando Domingo D’Agostino for the murder of eight women and four men. A third crew member Enrique José de Saint Georges, was charged but died of natural causes while awaiting trial. The victims had been tortured and sedated before being loaded on the aircraft and their clothing was removed by members of the crew. In the air the Skyvan's ramp door was opened and the captives were pushed out to fall thousands of feet to their death in the South Atlantic.