A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and 16-year Delta Air Lines pilot says foreign airlines may be harboring terror cells after a FlyDubai copilot allegedly attacked his captain mid-flight with a crash ax, sending the jet into a violent 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,” Buzz Patterson told Fox News Digital. “And I think it is something that DOJ needs to take a… really good look at.”
The attack happened aboard a FlyDubai flight from the United Arab Emirates to Tel Aviv, carrying 174 passengers and eight crew. The plane made an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, after the copilot reportedly struck the captain with the aircraft’s crash ax in an attempt to take over the cockpit. Investigators have not ruled out terrorism or a mental health crisis as the motive.
Patterson, who once carried the nuclear football for President Bill Clinton, says the industry’s reliance on self-reporting leaves a dangerous blind spot.
“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,” Patterson said. “So that’s part of the problem, I think, that we’re going to start seeing pop up in airline profiles and pilot profiles is we have a lot of people out there that probably shouldn’t be flying airplanes.”
Every Boeing 737, Patterson explained, carries a crash ax mounted behind the copilot’s seat, meant to let crew break into the cockpit door or windows in an emergency.
“If the copilot used the crash ax, that is savage because that thing will hurt you,” he said, describing how easily a crew member could reach the tool unnoticed. “I can easily see the copilot saying he needed to stretch… 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.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told “FOX & Friends” the copilot appeared to have undergone “Islamist radical indoctrination,” though officials said it would take days to determine any link to Iran. President Donald Trump has since said he believes Iran was tied to the incident. Netanyahu also said the copilot, an Omani national, slipped through a loophole in Israeli restrictions that normally bar pilots from countries without diplomatic relations with Israel.
Patterson said he has emailed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to flag his concerns about hiring practices at international carriers.
“International carriers and a few domestic carriers cast a very wide net looking for applicants to be aircrew members and pilots,” Patterson said. “And sometimes that net is a little too wide for who they attract to their airlines.”
He noted that background checks, medical histories and aviation violation records remain the industry standard, but radicalization or personality shifts after hiring are far harder to catch.
Patterson also pointed to a structural weakness in how airline crews operate: pilots rarely fly with the same colleagues twice.
“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.”
He said opening conversations in the cockpit — background, family life, what’s going on personally — can surface red flags, but only to a point. “You can’t flesh it all out. There’s just no way. And you don’t know,” he said.
Patterson is calling for the U.S. to scrutinize not just domestic hiring but which foreign crews are permitted to fly into 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… 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?” he said.
Patterson said 9/11 reshaped aviation security, but gaps remain. “You never know what you’re carrying on the back of the airplane,” he said. “Sometimes the guy you’re flying with is a wild card and sometimes the guys in the back of the airplane are a wild card. And I think that just some companies do the job, the security job, and they do the vetting screening better than other companies do.”
