Terror Cells in Foreign Airlines ‘Certainly Possible,’ Retired Pilot Warns

A former Delta Air Lines pilot who once carried the nuclear football for President Bill Clinton is warning that terrorist cells could potentially exist within foreign airlines after a FlyDubai copilot allegedly attacked the captain of an Israel-bound flight, sending the aircraft into a perilous dive.

“It’s possible that terror cells can exist inside airline companies – overseas, probably a lot easier than here, but it’s certainly a possibility,” retired Air Force Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson, who spent 16 years as a Delta pilot, told News Media on Thursday. “And I think it is something that DOJ needs to take a…really good look at.”

The warning followed a FlyDubai flight traveling from the United Arab Emirates to Tel Aviv that made an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, after the copilot allegedly attacked the captain during the flight, reportedly using the cockpit’s crash ax. The aircraft was carrying 174 passengers and eight crew members. Investigators are examining the motive, including possible terrorism and mental health factors — circumstances Patterson said raise serious public safety concerns, even if they do not ultimately involve national security.

Patterson said the incident highlights the difficulty of identifying radicalization among airline employees. “If you’ve got somebody that’s, you know, radicalized and if he doesn’t tell his company or his buddies, you’re never gonna know,” he said, adding that many current safeguards depend on employees “self-reporting your activities.” He warned that airlines may increasingly discover people in pilot and employee profiles who “probably shouldn’t be flying airplanes.”

The concerns emerged as new details indicated that a crash ax stored behind the copilot’s seat in the Boeing 737 was allegedly used to strike the captain in an attempt to seize control of the aircraft.

“Every 737, and that’s what I flew my entire life of all the different models, has a crash ax in the cockpit right behind the copilot so that we can, if we have to, either crack into the door or crack into the windows in the event of an emergency, we can do it,” Patterson said. “If the copilot used the crash ax, that is savage because that thing will hurt you.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told “FOX & Friends” on Thursday morning that the copilot appeared to have undergone “Islamist radical indoctrination.” He said, however, that officials would need several days to determine whether the man had links to Iran. President Donald Trump later said he believed there were ties to Iran.

“International carriers and a few domestic carriers cast a very wide net looking for applicants to be aircrew members and pilots,” said Patterson, who has emailed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy about his concerns. “And sometimes that net is a little too wide for who they attract to their airlines.”

Patterson said airlines in the United States and abroad generally place heavy emphasis on background checks, medical records and previous aviation violations. However, he cautioned that changes in a pilot’s personality or signs of radicalization may be difficult to identify after the person has been hired.

He also noted that pilots frequently work alongside colleagues they barely know, making it difficult to assess their mental health or personal circumstances.

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“You never know what you’re gonna bring to the table, what you gonna find in the cockpit next to you when you first get to the cockpit, because we don’t fly with the same guys multiple times – we fly with different people almost every single time,” he said. “So every single time we get in a cockpit, we’re meeting somebody for the first time, nine times out of 10.

“So we never know who we’re getting either. And that’s why the initial conversation in the cockpit’s important. What’s your background? What’s mine? How’s your family life? What’s going on in your world? That kind of stuff will flesh out some of that stuff, but you can’t flesh it all out. There’s just no way. And you don’t know.”

Patterson said the crash ax carried in the Boeing 737 cockpit represents a potential security vulnerability that should be addressed, regardless of whether commercial flight crews in the United States undergo only random screening at airports.

“It’s right there,” Patterson said Thursday, before official reports identified the crash ax as the weapon allegedly used by the suspected terrorist. “You know, I can easily see the co-pilot saying he needed to stretch. He pulls out of the seat because we do this in the 737. It’s a very tight cockpit.

“Occasionally one pilot will get up, stand in the back of the cockpit and just stretch, you know, get the blood pumping. And it would be very easy for the copilot just to reach down while standing up and grab that ax. I mean, I can see it happening, and God forbid if it did because that’s brutal.”

The alleged attack underscores the need for the United States to scrutinize not only domestic airline hiring practices, Patterson said, but also the foreign flight crews permitted to enter American airspace.

“I think the United States needs to take a close look at not only who we are allowing to operate heavy machinery in this country, and by heavy machinery, I mean aviation, airplanes,” Patterson said. “Who we are hiring and putting into those positions of authority, and then more importantly, who are we allowing from the other carriers to fly into our airspace?”

Netanyahu told Fox News that the FlyDubai copilot was an Omani national who entered the cockpit despite what he described as a “loophole” in Israel’s restrictions on pilots from countries that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel.

While “9/11 changed everything in terms of aviation for everybody,” clearly there is far more work to be done to ensure airline safety, he concluded.

“You never know what you’re carrying on the back of of the airplane,” he said. “Sometimes the guy you’re flying with is a wild card and sometimes the guys in the back the airplane are a wildcard. And I think that just some companies do the job, the security job, and they do the vetting screening better than other companies do.”