Wolfgang Koch began his airline career at Mesa airlines in 1990. After 5 years of service at Mesa, he joined Northwest Airlines (NWA) and is now employed by Delta Airlines. He served as member and chair of the NWA Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA) Security Committee since 2002, until the merger with Delta Airlines in 2009. Since the merger, Wolfgang spent over three years as chairman for the aviation security committee at Delta Airlines, and vice chairman for the Aviation Security structure with ALPA. In October 2015, he was elected as chair for the ALPA National Security Group and presently serves in that role representing over 79,000 pilots at 42 airlines in the United States and Canada. Further, Wolfgang serves as the vice chair of the security committee at the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Association (IFALPA) where he represents over 148,000 pilots in nearly 100 countries world-wide.

During his tenure at NWA, Wolfgang focused his efforts on improving many facets of security for its crew members. Some of these security features include liaison work with the Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) program; Federal Air Marshal (FAM) aircraft familiarization training; design aspects of CrewPASS, which is now the Known Crew Member (KCM) security checkpoints; cockpit door secondary barrier proofing; and crew layover protection standards.

Throughout his years of security advocacy, he has moderated public panels on aviation security threats at ALPA’s yearly Air Safety Forum, and has presented on aviation security lessons learned and future threat topics to ensure that security dialogues continue in a constructive and informative manner. Additionally, he has served on the TSA’s Aviation Security Advisory Committee as a subject-matter expert for the Airline and Insider Threat Subcommittees. Since 2012, he has been an active stakeholder participant for FFDOs with the TSA’s Aviation Programs Branch, Office of Law Enforcement.

Wolfgang presently flies domestically & internationally as a captain on the Airbus A350 and has accumulated over 20,000 accident and incident free flight hours. He holds an airline transport pilot certificate with several aircraft type ratings, a flight engineer—turbo- jet certificate, a certified flight instructor certificate, and a ground instructor certificate. His prior airline experience included piloting aircraft with traffic reporters around the Nation’s Capital and served as a mission pilot for the Civil Air Patrol over the Chesapeake Bay area. He holds a BA degree from the University of Maryland, College Park campus.