An Italian pilot who told his wife he would crash a passenger jet if she dumped him, was stopped from taking the controls of a flight minutes before it was due to take off.
If cops hadn’t intervened just in time the apparently suicidal pilot could have killed all 200 passengers onboard – in a chilling echo of the Germanwings crash in March last year.
The Italian man, who has not been named, was scheduled to be piloting a flight from Rome to Japan.
He was already known to police in Padua, Italy, after his wife had reported him for mistreatment.
When she threatened to leave him he sent her a text saying he would kill himself and everyone on board the passenger flight.
The woman immediately told police who alerted officials at Fiumicino Airport in Rome.
The potential disaster was averted in January last year but has been kept a secret until now.
The Italian pilot who threatend the mass killing is in his 40s and has children, but the airline he worked for has not been named.
He was suspended and is still undergoing psychiatric evaluation, Italian media reported yesterday.
After officers stepped in to prevent the man from taking control of the plane, a substitute pilot was called in and passengers were not told what had happened.
A spokesman for Anpac, the Italian pilots’ union, said that an Alitalia pilot was suspended three years ago in a similar incident where his wife raised the alarm.
He was allowed to return to flying after completing checks.
On March 24 last year Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately locked the senior pilot out of the cockpit before crashing a plane into a mountain in the French Alps. – The Sun.
