An American Airlines mechanic has appeared in federal court on a sabotage charge after being accused of disabling a navigation system before it was scheduled to take off from Miami International Airport (MIA) with 150 people on board, earlier this summer.
According to a criminal complaint filed, the mechanic, Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, has been charged with "willfully damaging, destroying or disabling an aircraft," according to The Miami Herald.
The reason, according to the criminal report, was that Alani was upset due to stalled union contract negotiations, between American Airlines and its mechanics unions, which had already reached a boiling point, when in May 2019, the company filed a lawsuit against the unions claiming that their members purposefully slowed down work causing flight disruptions. The unions have denied the allegations.
Alani is accused of tampering with the aircraft’s air data module (ADM), a component of the air data system, which reports critical flight parameters such as speed, pitch and other, and feeds it into the main avionics displays.
The suspect allegedly used foam material to obstruct a pitot tube leading from the outside of the plane to its air data module (ADM).
Because of the tampering, an error was caused as the pilots powered up the plane's engines on the runway on July 17. The 737 was returned to the gate at MIA and passengers were accomodated on a replacement aircraft for the flight.
Subsequently, the 737 was taken out of service for maintenance inspections and it was then that the sabotage attempt was discovered.