Terror cells inside foreign airlines 'certainly a possibility,' retired pilot warns

The man who once carried the nuclear football for former President Bill Clinton is sounding an alarm on potential terror cells inside foreign airlines after a FlyDubai copilot allegedly attacked the captain of an Israel-bound flight and sent the plane into a death-defying, aeronautics-defying 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, a former Delta Air Lines pilot of 16 years, told Fox News Digital on Thursday. "And I think it is something that DOJ needs to take a... really good look at."

The warning came after a FlyDubai flight from the United Arab Emirates to Tel Aviv was forced to make an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, after the copilot attacked the captain mid-flight, reportedly with the crash ax. The flight was carrying 174 passengers and eight crew, and investigators are still probing the motive, including possible terrorism or mental health factors – both of which leave Patterson concerned for public safety, if not national security.

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"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, noting most protocols rely on "self-reporting your activities." "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."

The warning comes amid the revelations that a crash ax found behind the copilot chair in the Boeing 737 was used to bludgeon the pilot in an effort to commandeer 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."

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told "FOX & Friends" on Thursday morning that the copilot appeared to have undergone "Islamist radical indoctrination," but said officials would need days to determine whether he had ties to Iran. President Donald Trump since expressed the belief there were ties to Iran.

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

Patterson said U.S. and foreign airlines typically focus heavily on background checks, medical history and aviation violations, but warned that personality changes or radicalization can be difficult to detect once a pilot is hired.

Patterson also warned that pilots often fly with colleagues they barely know – much less a deep understanding of their mental health.

"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 continued. "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."

There remains a potential security loophole that needs to be closed with that 737 crash ax in the cockpit, regardless of whether U.S. commercial crews are only randomly screened at airports, according to Patterson.

"It's right there," Patterson said Thursday before official reports noted the crash ax as the weapon used by the suspected terrorist. "You know, I can easily see the copilot 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."

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The terrorist scheme emphasizes that the U.S. should scrutinize not only domestic airline hiring, but also foreign crews entering American airspace, he warned.

"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 noted to Fox News that the FlyDubai copilot attack was an Omani national who made it through a "loophole" of an Israeli restriction against pilots from countries that do not have 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 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."