Colonel Stuart: The colonel who crashed a plane full of passengers to free a dictator

Halfway through Die Hard 2 (Renny Harlin, 1990), a British passenger plane approaches Dulles International Airport, in Washington, in the middle of a snowstorm on Christmas Eve. From a church on the outskirts of the airport, Colonel William Stuart poses as air traffic control and recalibrates sea level on the plane’s altimeter: the pilots believe they still have height when they are about to hit the ground. On the runway, John McClane, a Los Angeles police lieutenant who had come to pick up his wife, waves makeshift torches to warn them. The plane crashes and everyone on board dies. It is Stuart’s retaliation because McClane has just saved an airport engineer and killed several of his men at the antenna array. Stuart, a former special forces officer now out of the army, leads a group of ex-military men who have seized the airport’s control systems. Their aim is to free General Ramón Esperanza, a corrupt foreign military leader who is arriving under extradition for using American funds to buy drugs. Stuart and his men admire him because he fought communism. The Blue Light unit sent to stop them, led by Major Grant, Stuart’s former mentor, turns out to be in league with him. McClane foils the escape by setting fire to the fuel trail of the plane they flee in. Bringing down a plane full of strangers as a punishment, and calling it part of a mission, requires what Albert Bandura called moral disengagement.

// The theoryHow conscience is switched off

Albert Bandura, one of the most cited psychologists of the twentieth century, developed the theory of moral disengagement from the late 1980s. According to Bandura, people regulate themselves morally: they feel guilt when they do something that contradicts their values, and that stops them. But there are mechanisms that allow this self-regulation to be switched off. Some act on the conduct: moral justification (“I do it for a just cause”), euphemistic language and advantageous comparison. Others act on responsibility: displacement and diffusion. Others act on consequences, minimizing them. And others act on the victims: dehumanization and attribution of blame.

// The subjectA soldier without a war

The film introduces Stuart, played by William Sadler, exercising naked in a hotel room with absolute physical discipline. He is a soldier who has lost his war and his army, and who has found in Esperanza’s cause a way of remaining a soldier. He shows no gratuitous cruelty: he is efficient, professional and cold. His danger lies in the conviction that what he does is right. For him, the dead passengers are collateral damage in a war that only he is still fighting.

The crash is staged as a procedure. Stuart does not shout or celebrate: he gives the pilots instructions in the calm voice of a controller and lets the instruments do the rest. Bandura would point to two mechanisms at once. Euphemistic language turns the killing into an adjustment of figures, and displacement of responsibility puts the blame on whoever forced his hand: if McClane and the authorities had not interfered, nobody would have died. The cause supplies the third, moral justification, and the passengers are left without a face.

// The crackDisengagement does not explain the ideology

Bandura’s theory explains how Stuart can kill a whole planeload of passengers without guilt, but not why he embraces Esperanza’s cause. Disengagement mechanisms are tools in the service of a prior motivation, and the film barely explores that motivation beyond a few lines about the government’s betrayal.

The film also simplifies the relationship between military training and violence against civilians. Research on war crimes shows that moral disengagement occurs mainly in group contexts, with peer pressure, orders from above and dehumanization of the enemy. Stuart acts in a group, but the film presents him as a case of individual conviction.