The movie is based on the relationship of 9/11 terrorist Ziad Jarrah and his wife Aysel Sengun. However, changes were made as the film is not meant to be a docudrama; Jarrah is renamed as Saeed while Sengun was renamed as Asli, and Jarrah trained for Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan while Saeed is assumed to have trained in Yemen. The World Trade Center towers were also not shown, although footages and photos of its collapse were used. Everything else, including the time frame and settings, is an exact dramatization of reports regarding Jarrah's life in the 9/11 Commission Report.
This is the second film to feature the relationship of Ziad Jarrah and Aysel Sengun. The first one being the 2004 film "The Hamburg Cell", a television film that dramatizes Jarrah's indoctrination, his involvement with a group of radical Muslims, and the preparation for the 9/11 attacks. These two movies can be watched one after another: "The Hamburg Cell" is mostly told in Jarrah's point of view, while "Copilot" is entirely from Sengun's perspective (in this case, Asli's).
Saeed Awad's character in the film is based on Ziad Jarrah life - one of the terrorist from Lebanon who was studying in Hamburg, Germany.
During the prosecution of the so named "20th hijacker", Zacarias Moussaoui in 2005, the F.B.I. conceded that it had absolutely no direct evidence that any of the supposed, suspected, accused, alleged 'hijackers' named, boarded any of the missing 9/11 planes.
The film was released in the UK on 10 September 2021, one day before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the United States.