The Market Can Shake the Aircraft. Only You Can Crash It.

By Ramesh Ramaswamy · Edited by Meenakshi Ramesh · 6 October 2026 · 7 min read

When news broke of the terrifying attack aboard Flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv on 30 September 2026, the aviation world froze. According to UAE authorities, the co-pilot, a man previously grounded by a former employer over concerns about extremist views, turned an emergency tool, the cockpit crash axe, against the captain, struck him repeatedly and sent the aircraft into a steep dive. He reportedly told investigators that he intended to crash the plane in Tel Aviv. A kind of black swan!

Disaster was averted only because the badly injured captain managed to unlock the cockpit door. Passengers rushed in and subdued the attacker, and off-duty pilots travelling on board took the controls and landed the aircraft safely at Tabuk in Saudi Arabia.

The incident offers a chilling lesson: external safety protocols and mechanical reliability mean nothing when the destruction originates from inside the cockpit.

In financial trading, market participants spend endless hours obsessing over external threats: central bank rate hikes, geopolitical escalation, earnings surprises and flash crashes. Yet, just like Flight FZ1073, the most sudden and account-destroying disasters rarely come from the market itself. They happen when a trader's own psychology turns hostile, hijacks the execution logic and weaponises their own toolkit against their capital.

1. Ideological delusion: trading a fantasy, not the chart

The co-pilot on Flight FZ1073 was not responding to an engine failure or to turbulence. He was engineering destruction from the inside.

In trading, delusion sets in when a trader abandons real-time price feedback and market structure in favour of an internal narrative. Instead of managing the risk of the trade in front of them, they trade a personal fantasy:

• Confirmation bias: filtering out structural breakdowns on the chart while desperately searching social media, forums or friendly news feeds for anything that justifies a collapsing position.
• The "I am right, the market is wrong" trap: holding a short position in a roaring bull market (or a long one during a panic) because of a belief about where the economy should go.
• Revenge trading: firing off aggressive, counter-trend orders straight after a losing trade to "get back" at the market, abandoning every predefined risk parameter.

2. The herd and outsourced responsibility: relinquishing the controls

Imagine a co-pilot surrendering the flight controls to an unknown voice on the radio without checking the horizon or the instrument panel. In trading, herd mentality and blind reliance on brokers or tips is a recipe for a certain crash.

When fear and insecurity overtake a trader's discipline, caution goes out of the window:

• Blindly following broker and tipster advice: executing high-risk derivative calls or stock tips from brokers, advisory services or social media "gurus" without checking the technical setup, the risk-reward ratio or the liquidity.
• Herd behaviour (FOMO): buying at market tops simply because "everyone else is buying". The fear of missing out overrides basic due diligence and pulls traders into crowded, overextended trades just as the smart money begins to distribute.
• Outsourcing accountability: following outside advice blindly creates an emotional safety net. When the trade fails, the trader blames the broker or the crowd rather than accepting that they chose to fly blind. Instead of changing their trading style, they change their broker or their guru, and so remain in the whirlpool forever.

Trading reality: a broker or advisory service earns its commission whether your account grows or blows up. The moment you delegate your entries and your risk decisions to the crowd, you hand someone else the controls of your cockpit.

3. Weaponising the toolkit: how greed overrides safety

In the Flydubai cockpit, the weapon was a crash axe: a tool carried for the crew's safety in an emergency.

Greed works in exactly the same way in trading. It takes the tools designed to build wealth, such as leverage, options and position sizing, and turns them into weapons of self-destruction:

• Over-leverage as a crash axe: using extreme leverage or margin to size up on a setup in the hope of doubling the account quickly, so that an ordinary market retracement becomes total liquidation. (Blog 1 shows how to size a position so one bad trade stays survivable.)
• Moving stop-losses: removing a stop-loss or pushing it further away during an adverse move, turning a protective risk boundary into unlimited, catastrophic exposure.
• Throwing caution to the wind: doubling down on a failing position (a Martingale) in the hope that a better average price will bring recovery, multiplying the loss until the account hits a margin call.

4. Fear and paralysis: freezing at the controls

When the Flydubai captain was attacked, the aircraft entered a sudden, steep dive and reportedly lost about 17,000 feet while control was being fought over. Surviving that descent required immediate, decisive intervention.

When unexpected volatility strikes the market, fear paralyses a trader's ability to act:

Behavioural finance shows that the pain of a loss is felt roughly twice as intensely as the pleasure of an equal gain (loss aversion). Fear makes traders freeze as price crosses their risk limit. By refusing to take a small, controlled loss, they stay trapped until absolute panic forces a devastating exit.

Building "cockpit redundancies" for your account

Aviation relies on strict operating protocols, automated flight systems and checks to guard against a rogue or incapacitated human at the controls. Traders need equivalent firewalls to protect their capital from their own psychological lapses:

Final thoughts

The Flydubai incident showed that the most dangerous element on any flight is not the altitude, the weather or the aircraft. It is a compromised operator at the controls.

In share trading, volatility is a constant. You cannot control central bank policy, macroeconomic shifts or sudden market shocks. Long-term survival depends entirely on mastering your own flight deck: recognising when greed is over-extending your leverage, when the herd is tempting you to fly blind, and when delusion is steering your portfolio towards a crash.

The market can shake the aircraft. Only you can crash it.