Photo: Russell Lee / wikipedia.org
An American Airlines mechanic was arrested this week and charged with sabotaging a plane with 150 passengers about to take off from the Miami International Airport this summer.
The incident occurred on July 17, as the plane was preparing for takeoff, an affidavit obtained by the Miami Herald reveals. Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani has been working as a mechanic for American Airlines for a long time, and his issue wasn’t with the passengers: this was not terrorism, he said. Instead, his goal was to ground the plane so that he could clock in overtime and make a few extra bucks.
According to the affidavit, when agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested him at his home, he said stalled contract negotiations between the mechanics’ union and the airline had hurt him financially, so he needed whatever extra money he could get. He thought that, by tampering with the plane, he would be able to ground or delay it, which could have resulted in more work for him.
Alani tampered with the airplane’s air data module, which collects vital data such as speed and pitch. By disabling it, he would have forced the pilots to fly manually, had not the issue been detected before takeoff. When the pilots powered up the engines, they were alerted of the malfunction to the ADM system, so takeoff was aborted.
“An AA mechanic found a loosely connected tube in front of the nose gear underneath the cockpit that had been deliberately obstructed with some sort of hard foam material,” the report notes. Alani was charged with “willfully damaging, destroying or disabling an aircraft.”
Alani was identified thanks to surveillance footage showing him approaching the plane right after it had landed in from Orlando, before heading off again to Nassau. It took him 7 minutes to disable the system, and he was identified by his peer mechanics, who recognized him by his limp.
According to the affidavit, when agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested him at his home, he said stalled contract negotiations between the mechanics’ union and the airline had hurt him financially, so he needed whatever extra money he could get. He thought that, by tampering with the plane, he would be able to ground or delay it, which could have resulted in more work for him.
Alani tampered with the airplane’s air data module, which collects vital data such as speed and pitch. By disabling it, he would have forced the pilots to fly manually, had not the issue been detected before takeoff. When the pilots powered up the engines, they were alerted of the malfunction to the ADM system, so takeoff was aborted.
“An AA mechanic found a loosely connected tube in front of the nose gear underneath the cockpit that had been deliberately obstructed with some sort of hard foam material,” the report notes. Alani was charged with “willfully damaging, destroying or disabling an aircraft.”
Alani was identified thanks to surveillance footage showing him approaching the plane right after it had landed in from Orlando, before heading off again to Nassau. It took him 7 minutes to disable the system, and he was identified by his peer mechanics, who recognized him by his limp.
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