Rogue Pilots Are a Growing Safety Threat. No One Knows How to Stop Them.

Just a heads up, today's episode discusses suicide and plane crashes. Please take care when listening. Last week, on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, there was an altercation in the cockpit. The plane plunged 16,000 feet in under a minute. The initial reports suggested that one of the pilots tried to crash the plane or at least put it into this dive for whatever reason. Middle Eastern authorities say they suspect the first officer tried to crash the plane on purpose in an attempted terror attack. Other pilots who happened to be on the fly Dubai flight were able to regain control of the plane and land it safely. Our colleague, Andrew Tangle, covers aviation and the fly Dubai incident got him thinking. It immediately triggered a thought that, oh, well, here's another case of potentially intentional crash that we've been hearing about. For the past year, Andrew's been reporting on a persistent problem in the airline industry. You have these spikes over a few years in aviation fatalities, not for bird strikes, not for loss of engines or some sort of mechanical problem, accidentally flying to terrain. It's a safety concern that is often whispered about, but rarely openly discussed. If, you know, the suspicions are correct, then it's this phenomenon of a pilot someone in the cockpit intentionally killing themselves on everyone on board. In other words, rogue pilots crashing planes on purpose. There is some disagreement that rogue pilots are a problem. In some fatal crashes where rogue pilots are suspected to be the cause, some investigators don't subscribe to that theory. But Andrew has spoken to current and former US Air Safety officials who say there is a disturbing pattern. The crashes are intentionally being carried out by pilots experiencing severe mental health issues. According to people familiar with the matter, the threat from rogue pilots has come up during high-level discussions at the Federal Aviation Administration and at the companies that design planes like Boeing. When reporting this, I've heard that inside Boeing, it's sort of quietly regarded among senior executives as one of if not the biggest killer in commercial aviation these days. Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Conuchson. It's Thursday, October 8th. Coming up on the show, a deadly problem in the airline industry that no one wants to talk about. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, when fatal plane crashes were more common, not as many people relied on air travel to get around. But in the 90s, as flying became more popular, the industry and government realized that if flying continues at the same growth rate, we're going to have many more fatal crashes. The FAA worried that more planes in the sky would mean more accidents and more deaths. What can we do to make aviation even safer? And so they focus on essentially changing how the government, the FAA, in this case, enforces its regulations. Regulators and airlines worked to create an industry culture that encouraged self-reporting without penalty. Airlines began sharing information with each other to avoid competing on safety. Airplane manufacturers, meanwhile, worked to make the planes themselves safer. One longstanding problem was crashes due to planes accidentally flying into terrain, like mountains. And there was this celebrated engineer who made this system called the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System. So, to help pilots avoid crashing into mountains, it'll say pull up, pull up, you know, terrain, terrain, and you know, it has at least warnings. That alarm system is considered to be one of the most important developments in modern aviation. So much so that when the engineer behind it died a few years ago, and people realising him probably rightly said that he is responsible for saving more lives in modern aviation than maybe anybody else. And then 9/11 happened, and threats inside the cockpit became a new focus, specifically keeping hijackers out. After 9/11, then President George W. Bush gave a speech at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Thank you all very much for such a warm welcome. And he called for reinforced cockpit doors, physical barriers to prevent hijackers from breaking into the cockpit. To fortify doors and provide stronger locks, so our pilots will always be in command of the airplanes. Lots of new ideas were put on the table. Engineers explored remote control technology, so air traffic controllers could take over if something went wrong inside the cockpit. That idea in particular didn't work for two basic reasons. When you have sort of remote control computer links to aircraft from the ground, you introduce potential cyber vulnerabilities. So it could be hacked, but also we talked to a NASA researcher who was working on less of the time, who heard from Boeing that they didn't think it would work because you'd have to remove all of the circuit breakers from the cockpit. Because a pilot with ill intent could just disable the remote landing system by pulling a circuit breaker. Andrew says these remote piloting ideas started running up against a core tent into the airline industry. The foundational principle in aviation has long been that pilots have ultimate authority, they're responsible for the safety of the aircraft, they're in charge of the ship. And so if you're having the automation do things that contradict what the pilots want to do and override the pilots, then who's in charge of the airplane and how safe can those computers be? Boeing said we're never gonna let some system override the pilots. Still, all of the technical changes that have been made to flying over the last few decades have vastly improved safety. In fact, the US recently went 15 years without a major crash, but there's still one issue that the industry can't engineer its way out of. What happens if the pilot is the problem? That's next. When a plane crashes, investigators are often able to recover enormous amounts of data from black boxes. They record airspeed, changes in altitude, and sound inside the cockpit. That information can then help diagnose what went wrong. But sometimes there are plane crashes without an obvious explanation, like one in June of 2025 in India. Playing traveling from Amadabad to London crashed within seconds of taking off. An urgent investigation is underway following one of the world's worst aviation disasters in a decade. It really was a mystery in the aviation world. When it happened, you had a Boeing 787 Dreamliner lifting off from Amadabad in Western India. And shortly after it lifted off the runway, it essentially sort of pancakes to the ground and kills everyone except one person on board. The air India crashed and waves of anxiety throughout the industry. It was the first time that a Boeing 787 had crashed, and nobody can understand why these engines lost lift. Was there some kind of mechanical problem that could affect other Boeing 787 Dreamliners? And if so, what type of potentially drastic emergency action do they need to take? We even reported that the Federal Aviation Administration was preparing to ground the fleet if they needed to. Andrew spoke with industry and government officials in the US who privately suspect that the pilot intentionally crashed the plane. But an Indian pilot group disputes that theory. And local crash investigators haven't reached the same conclusion. Their investigation is still ongoing. Another case. In 2022, a Boeing 737 crashed into a mountainside in China. The flight data recorder show that the plane went into a barrel roll before the crash. Four and a half years later, we don't have the report. There's no word from the Chinese government. So we have no idea what the hell happened officially. Chinese officials didn't respond to requests for comment. Then, there was the mystery of Malaysia Air Flight 370. The plane that seemed to completely disappear over the Indian Ocean in 2014. Raking news tonight, a Malaysia Airlines flight with 239 people on board, including four Americans, has gone missing. Along with the cases in India and China, US officials suspect that a rogue pilot caused the Malaysian air flight disappearance. US intelligence is leading toward the theory that the pilots are responsible. Even further back, there was a plane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean about 60 miles off the coast of Nantucket Island. A very famous case. was in 1999, Egypt Air took off from JFK in New York, headed to Cairo. The National Transportation Safety Board led the investigation. An earlier draft of their report found that an Egypt Air First Officer had made an intentional change to the flight controls, which caused the crash. The Egyptian authorities strongly disagreed. They said that the theory isn't hold up that there's some Boeing technical problem with the aircraft, and that's the real cause. And so to walk a diplomatic tightrope, the NCSP, when they issued what they called their statement of probable cause, the probable cause of that crash was the first officer's inputs into the flight controls. And that's it. Andrew says in international cases like these, disagreement can be a big problem. Multiple agencies can wind up investigating crashes, and sometimes they don't reach the same conclusion. They may have different technical perspectives. They may have different analytical approaches, but if you talk to former American officials who have been on the other side of some of these investigations that are indisputed, they will say that countries just often don't want to acknowledge that a pilot for their country's growing flagship carrier, intentionally crash an airplane and kill everybody. But there is a well-known case where it's indisputable that the crash was intentional. The case of the German wings crash in 2015. Investigators found that the pilot had serious mental health issues. This pilot, Andreas Lubitz, he locked the captain out of the cockpit during a bathroom break and programmed the plane's computers to descend essentially into the French Alps. And that fortified cockpit door post 9/11 innovation prevented anyone from stopping him, and in the end 150 people died in this disaster. It wasn't until investigators looked into the pilot's background that they found a history of severe depression and suicidal ideation. Just weeks before the crash, he'd been treated for psychosis. He was prescribed several medications, and the pilot's doctor had even recommended hospital treatment. But at the time, privacy laws and Germany were really strict and they kept his doctor from alerting the aviation authorities who might have otherwise intervened and grounded him essentially. European officials concluded that Lubitz didn't seek mental health treatment, because he was afraid that if he asked for help, he could lose his job. Andrew says that this reluctance on the part of the pilots is a problem across the industry. We all have mental health issues, but the structure in aviation is sort of built against you to seek treatment. Historically speaking, there's been a huge disincentive to come forward because you could lose your income. If you say you're seeing a psychologist or you're taking a certain medication, that could get you grounded for some amount of time. You could lose your medical clearance, which you need to fly. The thinking is that airlines and regulators don't want pilots with severe mental health issues to fly. But that, of course, makes people who think they might have an issue reluctant to speak up. Slowly but surely some of the advocates and regulators are trying to change that. The idea, as expressed to me, is they want to treat budding mental health issues and address them before they become worse. Mental health is like a quality of life issue for pilots. It also can affect just their day-to-day proficiency in the cockpit. You may not see it as a passenger, but presumably if you're distracted by a breakup or a death, that can keep you off your game like in a profession. And this is a profession that is high stakes where they have to compartmentalize. They can't have a bad day. After the German wings crash more than a decade ago, the European Union began requiring doctors to report pilots with severe mental health issues to aviation authorities. In the US, recent bipartisan legislation is aimed at improving how regulators address pilot mental health. And despite the axiom that pilots must always be in control of the plane, engineers are exploring systems that could defend against rogue pilots. Boeing has considered the threat of intentional crashes as it designs its next commercial airplane. You can't necessarily engineer out nefarious intent from an aircraft. That's still a big open question, but you can make it a lot harder to crash the airplane by accident or intentionally. Boeing declined a comment about intentional crashes, but said the company supports legislation aimed at pilot mental health. There's an obvious reason why any airline would hesitate to call attention to the issue of pilot mental health. They don't want passengers to be afraid. There's really no assumption built into all of the thinking about how to operate an airplane that deals with a pilot who's going to not fly the airplane and try to crash and kill everybody. That's just certainly not what passengers are thinking about when they're getting on a flight, but also not part of who goes into designing an aircraft and writing procedures for how to operate the aircraft safely. Airlines and pilot groups are trying to take this more seriously, generally speaking. The FAA has been criticized for having really outdated policies, but the head of the medical unit within the FAA said that they're trying to make it faster for pilots to stop having to wait to resume flying after they see treatments. They want to remove the stigma and they've got to remove the barriers and they recognize that. As with any problem, though, the first step is recognizing that there is one. And in that, Andrew says there is more attention being paid to the threat. For instance, something caught his eye in a presentation at a recent global aviation safety conference. And on the slides, it mentioned three of these suspected and confirmed cases, Malaysia Airlines, German wings, and China Eastern, as examples of the more extreme cases. So I think it's something that's being talked about more and more within the industry. And presumably this terrifying or deal with flight-to-by might accelerate that, but it all gets to this insider threat right in the cockpit. That's all for today. Thursday, October 8th. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, you can follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts throughout every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.