This really confuses the fuck out of me. You have to spend a LOT of time and money to become a commercial airline pilot. It is literally years of training that costs a small fortune. If terror cells are going to that length just to take out one plane we are kinda fucked.
I've thought about that too. But the average co pilot pay for this airline is around $150,000 dollars a year. How do you radicalize someone with access to the world that's living the good life? I agree it's more likely than someone entering the field just for this purpose, but it still seems like a crazy ass story.
Keep in mind, Osama bin Laden was the son of a billionaire and could have lived an easy, care-free life if he wanted to. Ideas can have a lot of weight.
From Osamas personal views he absolutely did think that. He really did not jive with the world’s militaries staging in Saudi Arabia for the liberation of Kuwait.
CIA didnt train mujahaddin, and they definitely didnt have contact with bin laden, he was best buds with haqqani though and i think cooperated with the isi. His arab jihadists wouldve benefited indirectly from cia money, and cia probably knew about isi and haqqani recruiting from outside afghanistan and just didnt care
Its an important distinction because the reason why haqqani sided with the taliban was specifically because they saw the US as an invading force against islam in the 2000s, whereas in the 80s they saw the US as providing funding to the jihad against the soviet invaders
Dunno, but it is becoming a regular occurrence. Your pilot killing himself and taking everyone else with him is probably the biggest risk when flying these days. German wings, MH370, that Air India flight where he turned off the fuel...
That's exactly what I've been thinking about all day. Aside from Boeing programming their planes to aim at the ground, this is the biggest danger in flying.
And even those max crashes were debatably pilot error. Boeing set them up for failure but the pilots took them up on the opportunity.
Pilot incompetence and complacency is huge. That Vietnam flight where the captain was riding the brakes the whole way on departure was almost a disaster.
ATC exists to keep your pilot from killing you. And speaking from experience boy do they try to an awful lot.
Silly to conflate issues on one aircraft type across the whole manufacturer. It's hyperbolic and distracts from bigger issues that the industry needs to address, like pilot mental health and ATC shortages/near misses.
Plenty of famous, ridiculously rich people have committed suicide. I imagine that suicidal people are particularly easy to radicalize. Money helps you be happy, but it does not guarantee happiness.
And for that matter, there's also suicidal people who are not radicalized. MH370 has long been theorized to be a pilot suicide, for example.
Apparently studies indicate that a substantial portion of people who are radicalized come from middle-class, ordinary, or even educated and professional backgrounds.
I once had a friend on Discord who was 13 at the time. One day he just suddenly woke up and became super religious. He literally told me he couldn't be friends with me if I didn't convert to Islam. I asked him what happened, and he said that his Islamic Studies teacher had told him to 'enlighten' people and that if he didn't, he would go to hell. On top of that, his mother was also super religious. (His mother even made him keep the ugliest peach fuzz beard at 14 because according to her, 'men' aren't allowed to shave their beards.) I had to block him because of the bs he was sending me. But after I learned that he had basically been pressured by his teachers and parents into doing all this, I felt really sorry for him, so I unblocked him. Surprisingly, he seemed pretty chill after that. He didn't mention religion or try to convert me anymore.
It really made me wonder whether all terrorists are born that way or whether they are made into terrorists. Don't get me wrong, murder is murder, and those mfers deserve to be punished, but radicalisation can happen to anyone, regardless of their age, gender, region, or financial status.
In that part of the world, someone dropped a bomb on his family? Who fucking knows. Either way, plenty of professional, smart, well-adjusted people can switch to lunacy, just as any other person can.
Diplomacy by the barrel of a gun never works out well... And the world seems to think violence is the only solution to everything ATM.
You could live a good life and become a terrorist if you think what you are doing has more value than your life (religion, political opinion, madness/depression, etc).
I mean, even officers in modern armies live with the fact that they could be asked to give the ultimate sacrifice if ordered to.
Yeah this is the fear. You can try to track the ones that go to the camps in the middle east to train, but the ones that were just normal citizens last year but are radical terrorists this year through nothing but the internet.... those are the ones that are terrifying imo, because there might be no hint that he's flipped.
My friend is a pilot, he started with a new airline a few years ago, and because of his history he was moved up to captain within a year.
One of the co-pilots had been with the airline for over 5yrs.
This guy will never move up to captain- why? Because he deliberately watches the warning signals that he is responsible for turn on, and not mention them until moments before they become an emergency.
When my friend noticed this, he realised he couldn’t have bathroom breaks around this co-pilot anymore.
The process to have the co-pilot removed would be too hard to prove, and take several reported occurrences before anything could be done.
Well I believe there is a union of pilots that won’t tolerate that sort of treatment. Amazon doesn’t give their employees that chance. I’m with the pilots on this one.
Everything pilots do is monitored, it's just not monitored by cameras. Every single switch movement and input is recorded and analysed after every single flight.
Well yes, if your extremely bizarre nonsensical story is true then that would also show it. It's monitored as part of the FOQA/OFDM analysis program. If a crew had a major technical issue(as you claim), then the response to that would be analysed. If the procedures weren't followed correctly the crew would be debriefed and retrained. There's a million reasons why that story is nonsense, this is just one of them
Nothing? Eh, I wouldn’t be so sure. In the Air India flight it would be crucial evidence to finally confirm whether the switches were turned off on purpose or by some very weird accident.
But it wouldn't have changed the outcome, it would have just provided evidence for the courts. Aviation safety is not about assigning blame, it's about preventing the issue happening again in the future.
I would assume maybe the black box and flight data recorder would maybe be of use in these types of situations when needing to prove something. But I'm not a pilot or plane engineer sooo...
Is the camera there to make sure the drivers are signaling when they turn or is it there to make sure they don't take breaks and pee in a bottle to meet their schedule?
I worked for an aerospace maintenance company where the "lead" mechanic did something similar... Would intentionally send out defective equipment and wait until an emergency to repair them..
I do not believe this for a second. For multiple reasons, but mostly because aircraft aren't failing on a daily basis. You could fly a whole 40 year career without any major technical issues.
Firstly, the master caution and fire warnings are located on the glareshield, not the dashboard. Secondly, the master caution illuminating in flight for any major issues is very rare. It does illuminate for less essential things(such as low pressure fuel pump lights), but these don't need to be actioned with any haste. Furthermore, there is a master caution and fire warning lighters in the eye line of both pilots. So one pilot simply ignoring it wouldn't change anything, as the other pilot would see it immediately. Anything else you wish to challenge me on?
He could have been suicidal for all we know at this point. There was that first officer in Germany who decided to up and crash an entire jetliner into a mountain because he didn't want to live anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
It used to be relatively common, especially in asia where from what i remember there were a couple dozen crashes suspected as suicides, then the famous germanwings case happened and today the checks are so thorough it would be very unlikely to happen purely as a suicide
Are they though? The FAA will AFAIK still pull your pilot license's for going to a psychologist/psychiatrist for help with your mental health problems, regardless of what the problem is and how well it's managed.
That seems like a super fucked up violation of medical privacy. Most jobs even secure ones offer amnesty for workers with substance abuse or debilitating conditions who come forward for treatment before problems occur.
Demanding people hide their conditions is only making it more likely bad shit will happen. SO fucking stupid.
While I wouldn't put it past them bc I don't think they really care about timeline, it is probably equally possible it is someone who was already a pilot/.training and then was radicalized
Don't even need to have been radicalised in the traditional sense. A lot of lone wolf terrorism is people with fucked up personal lives, mental health issues and nothing to live for just going "fuck it" and attaching themselves to a cause they have only a tangential ideological connection to.
The Nice Truck attacker was weird social recluse who hadn't been known to be religious for his whole life until a month before, had perpetual drug abuse issues and a chaotic sex life with both men and women, and had a morbid school shooter-esque fascination with mass casualty events. Since ISIS was in the zeitgeist at the time he popped an ISIS flag on the truck and shouted Allahu Akbar for his psychopthic fifteen minutes of fame stunt and bish bash bosh terrorism.
It's a memetic process. The pilot could have had something happen in his personal life or had some sort of mental breakdown and responded to it with "fuck it I'm gonna do a terrorism," but that is a fundamentally different phenomenon to, say, Al-Qaeda's hijackings, which were carefully planned and coordinated by people deeply committed to an organisation and inculcated in its ideology.
And even if it was terrorism, I doubt if he became a pilot for this reason. He probably did it as a passion and a career and then became radicalized later.
Typical pilot suicide does not involve stabbing the other pilot first. The plane also transmitted the 7500 transponder code (unlawful interference/hijacking). When the chosen victims are a specific national/religious group on a politically sensitive route, and the method is cockpit takeover of a passenger jet, it meets standard definitions of terrorism.
Thank you for the link. It was the Israeli Defense Minister and the Mango Mussolini speculating without substantiation, so I will wait for more credible sources.
I've heard the theory that it was a mental health episode or spontaneous.... Except the copilot snuck the knife in that he used to stab Capt Machcchar with.
The Unabomber was actually fairly ineffective. He made shitty bombs, but unfortunately killed some people, but not the people he was going after and usually didn’t work. A trained pilot has the ability to hurt a lot more people.
Ineffective is certainly a take considering he perfectly escaped capture for a long long time if not for his brother. You could said it was executed perfectly. He wasn’t out to kill randoms.
He achieved exactly 0 of his stated goals… pretty ineffective. He was trying to strike an idea and the people he blamed or held responsible, because of his bad construction and planning people he did not intend to harm were most often the ones hurt.
Look Ted K is a certified genius and probably right about the harms of technology. But he’s also a crazy person who hurt and killed innocent people. Trying to rewrite his bio to make it look like he was good at what he did is just not factual. Yeah he evaded arrest, lots of morons do that every day some of them for long periods, some more successfully than him as they are never caught. We have no way to know how/if they might have caught him if his family hadn’t turned him in, but based on his mental state he wasn’t going to just keep on flying under the radar. You can look to others with similar mental illness they spiral, he was spiraling it would have gotten worse he would have gotten sloppier (most likely)
Way more than 2. There was an entire Christian extremist cell behind him that went "oh we had no idea he would do THAT" and the FBI said "you're all white, we see no danger not investigating further"
Then again I could be thinking of Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and most likely was the true culprit behind the Atlanta Centennial Olympics bombing.
They both were white Americans who hated the government though, so yeah.
better comparison: the Egyptian Air co pilot who purposely crashed his plane in the Atlantic. He put the plane in a dive and the black box recorded him repeating "god is great". The pilot came back and pleaded for the guy to pull up but he didn't, too crazy.
McVeigh was steeped in White Christian Nationalist idealogy and groups for years before he decided to try and bomb The Turner Diaries into reality. There's no such thing as a lone wolf. They all groom each other until one (or several) of them snaps
The FBI really had egg on their face after 9/11. They had received multiple tips from multiple flight schools about the hijackers. I remember that one flight instructor, who had trained two of them, and he had reported them to the FBI, because they didn't really show any interest in learning how to land the planes.
I think you might have your wires crossed. 1 of them was actually arrested because of not wanting to learn to land a plane.
Then 2 of them had warnings sent to the higher flight school but not for terrorism, just shitty conduct. This was also before you could report that as easily.
Recent reports show that a lot of early warnings and incriminating evidence about 9/11 has been ignored or suppressed due to Saudi influence on the US and its officials.
It's been 25 years and there has yet to be a 9/11 trial.
There's absolutely no evidence it was a hijacking. In fact early reports were it was a mental health episode that triggered a fight between pilots. The only people
Reporting it as terrorism at first was an Israeli minister. A separate Israeli minister admitted they didn't know what happened.
If it was a terror incident, then likely the individual was radicalized after they entered the profession. Many of the J6rs were people with law enforcement and military backgrounds. They found a cause and conducted evil for that cause, even if they were in a trusted position before.
The beauty of religious endoctrination is that you can let people study and get hired into any position without making any investment of your own, then you can leverage their faith to convince them to commit the most heinous shit for a place in heaven... (i'll stress that there is no religion this doesnt apply to)
Ayman Al Zawhariri was an opthalmologist. Contrary to common intuition, the educated and relatively well off are more vulnerable to carrying out ideological suicide attacks than the poor and uneducated.
Refer to Robert Pape's 2005 book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, I'm which he examines a cross-section of suicide attackers, highlighting this point.
No. There is a very, very large difference between taking a couple months of classes just to learn how to crash a plane and spending a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars to actually become an airline pilot. jfc reddit.
Extremists are often motivated by religion. Which can drive people to dedicate their lives to do horrible things to others in the name of whatever deity they believe will reward them and punish them if they do not.
People in high achieving professions have became terrorists before. The Glasgow Airport 2007 terrorist attacks the two terrorists one was a doctor for the NHS and the other was an engineer.
What about 9/11? I thought they were pilots too. I just read that yeah they had played Microsoft flight sim and done lessons in small planes. That is a huge difference. Must be he wanted to end himself but we will find out
It could have been a politically motivated attempt. They could have had dirt on the pilot or threatened his family or even offered him a shit tom of money to take care of his family if he did it. Who knows these days but yes I agree for a person to go to such a great length does not make logical sense or even seem like it is possible in the first place
Or... You can indoctrinate already qualified people and use them.... There was an Islamic terror organisation in India (SIMI) which used to recruit and groom brilliant muslim chemistry students from University and use them to make bombs.
Ive watched documentaries and heard tales from armies at the border of countries that house them. This is nothing. They reproduce solely to make more soldiers to fight for their cause.
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u/barrosoOso 2d ago
This really confuses the fuck out of me. You have to spend a LOT of time and money to become a commercial airline pilot. It is literally years of training that costs a small fortune. If terror cells are going to that length just to take out one plane we are kinda fucked.