If you routinely travel by air, then you know Air Atlantic has canceled multiple thousands of flights over the last two weeks.  Company spokesmen tell the media they needed to cancel flights so they can physically inspect their aging fleet.  But that's not the real story.  I phoned an Air Force colleague at Cyberspace Command who confirmed that Chinese hackers are behind the cancellations.  It's all highly classified, but my friend insists China's military has learned how to break into AA's cockpit computers while an aircraft is in flight.  They've also learned how to break into the airline's proprietary "Copilot" software that replaced all of their human pilot-navigators.

My friend verbally confirmed that Chinamen have also been launching denial-of-service attacks against the airline, which is a true worst-case scenario in the airline industry.  Knocking an entire airline off the Internet is far worse than knocking a single airliner out of the sky with a shoulder-fired missile.  The attacks on 9/11/01 proved that any airline can recover from the destruction of a few aircraft, but no airline can recover from the destruction of their Internet connection.

The airline didn't even know what was going on.  It all happened right under their noses until the Air Force gave a top secret briefing to Air Atlantic's board of directors.  Air Atlantic had to hire dozens of contract programmers in India to close the hundreds of security holes that the Chinamen are exploiting.

"Trust me," my friend said, "we've learned a lot about aviation cyber attacks from China's military hackers."  He couldn't reveal anything else because it's all hush-hush.  If the whole story were to get out to the stockholders, Air Atlantic might go belly-up.