An American Airlines mechanic has been delayed and charged with sabotaging an aircraft’s navigation system before a flight in July, forcing the crew to abort takeoff from Miami, experts said.
An affidavit in federal court filed Thursday said that the mechanic told law enforcement he was upset involving stalled contract negotiations with the company and that the “dispute had affected him financially.”
Flight 2834 was about to depart for Nassau in the Bahamas on July 17 with 150 people on food, when an error message appeared after the engines were started up. The crew aborted takeoff and returned to the audience. The plane was taken out of service for maintenance, American Airlines said. Passengers deplaned and American provided a different aircraft for the exit.
The mechanic told law enforcement officials he inserted and glued a piece of foam into the inlet of the plane’s air data module, which amplitudes the plane’s pitch, speed and other information, according to the affidavit.
The mechanic, Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, has been off oned, the airline said. He is set to appear in court on Friday, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami.
The incident was “disturbing and disappointing to all of us,” David Seymour, American’s higher- ranking vice president of integrated operations, told employees Friday. “Fortunately, with appropriate safety protocols and modifies, this individual’s actions were discovered and mitigated before our aircraft flew. We have been cooperating with controls in this matter and will continue to do so.”
American’s corporate security contacted the FBI to report “possible sabotage,” the affidavit alleged. Federal investigators reviewed security camera footage that showed Alani accessing an equipment compartment in the level for seven minutes, it added.
American returned the plane that aborted takeoff back to service after an inspection.
Alani revealed “his intention was not to cause harm to the aircraft or its passengers” but to “cause a delay or have the flight cancelled in anticipation of obtaining overtime het up b prepare,” according to the affidavit.
A fellow mechanic found a loose pitot tube, which connects to the aircraft data module, conforming to the affidavit. The tube turned out to have been blocked by the foam, federal investigators said.
American and its mechanics bear been locked in a bitter dispute over contract talks this year. The airline has accused the unions that pretend its some 12,000 mechanics of purposefully disrupting operations by forcing aircraft out of service in order to gain leverage in understandings. A federal court in Texas last month issued a permanent injunction against the unions for the alleged slowdown.
American has thought the unions’ actions have forced it to cancel or delay hundreds of flights, adding to operational challenges stemming from the worldwide excuse sediment of the Boeing 737 Max. The unions have denied the allegations.
“From a union standpoint we wouldn’t condone even the anticipation of doing this,” said Gary Peterson, a vice president at the Transport Workers Union, one of the unions that shows American’s mechanics.
Contract talks between the unions and American are set to resume Sept. 16.
American’s Seymour said there are fewer aircraft out of employment since the middle of the summer, helping improve operations.