- A Florida woman is accused of illegally modifying passenger aircraft records.
- Pilots could have flown aircraft with maintenance issues due to those modifications.
- Lauren Lide, 26, reportedly held a grudge against the flight-training company.
A Florida woman allegedly hacked into a flight training school's aircraft records and cleared the status of planes with known maintenance issues—potentially putting pilots in danger.
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On October 9, Lauren Lide, 26, of Brevard County, Florida, was charged with two counts of unauthorized access of a computer electronic device without authority, and one count of modifying computer data programs without authority, as the local TV station News Channel 8 first reported this week. Her alleged actions meant "aircraft which may have been unsafe to fly were purposely made 'airworthy,'" per an affidavit that the news outlet acquired.
Lide has a history with the Florida-based Melbourne Flight Training School, according to a Motherboard report. In November 2019, Lide quit her job as a Flight Operations Manager. Shortly thereafter, in January of 2020, the CEO of Melbourne Flight Training discovered that information on Flight Circle (an app his company used to keep track of its aircraft fleet) had been tampered with.
The tamperer allegedly deleted information about 12 airplanes, and deleted pilot-reported maintenance issues for individual planes, according to the Melbourne Airport Police. Reminders for aircraft to undergo maintenance were also deleted—an act that could have caused airplanes to fly longer than recommended without the proper maintenance procedures.
The CEO of the flight company discovered that the person who tampered with the records had logged in under an account associated with the current Flight Operations Manager. It's unclear how the offender accessed the password. Police then traced the IP address back to Hampton Lide, Lauren Lide's father.
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In 2019, the flight school fired Hampton Lide, which allegedly upset his daughter. Hampton Lide confessed to changing the records, according to News Channel 8, but could not explain how he did it. Authorities later determined that of the Lides, only Lauren had the knowledge to hack into the company records.
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Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he's generally in favor of it. Kyle’s articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News, and others. He lives in San Francisco.
