Federal Meteorologist Indicted for Selling $1.6M in Secret Airline Flight Data

On August 12, 2026, Adebowale Olajide Akinwande — a 14-year National Weather Service meteorologist and senior operator at the NWS Northpeak Forecast Office in Colorado — was indicted in the District of Colorado on eight federal counts including theft of trade secrets under the Economic Espionage Act, computer fraud, theft of government property, money laundering, securities fraud, and false statements on federal financial-disclosure filings after a 19-month investigation by the SEC Division of Enforcement, the FBI Denver Field Office, the Department of Commerce Office of Inspector General, and the DOJ Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section revealed he had been selling commercially sensitive airline operations data to a third-party aviation analytics intermediary firm for four years. Akinwande exploited his collateral access to FAA SWIM data feeds — including airline flight plan filings, fuel-load telemetry, and tactical re-route requests — exporting result sets to USB drives and uploading weekly CSV files to a Google Drive folder from his personal home internet connection. His monthly retainer was $14,000, with per-event premiums reaching $35,000 for major disruption data, totaling approximately $1.6 million received. Federal forensic economists estimated downstream competitive harm to the affected airlines at over $40 million. The smoking gun was the Google Drive upload history itself: 198 files spanning 47 months, each named with Akinwande's own initials — AKW — every one traced to his home IP address and his federal workstation user account. Among the downstream clients of the intermediary firm was a private-equity manager who used the advance operational intelligence to trade options in a publicly-traded airline holding company, and it was the SEC's detection of those suspiciously timed positions that unraveled the entire scheme.