Plane thief a ‘broken man’
A 29-YEAR-OLD “suicidal” airport worker who commandeered an empty plane from Seattle’s main airport and took it on an hour-long flight chased by F-15 fighter jets before crashing into a small island did not commit any security violations, officials said Saturday.
Horizon Air employee Richard Russell told an air traffic controller he was “just a broken man” minutes before dying late Friday in the Bombardier Q400 twin-engine turboprop plane, appearing to apologise for his actions.
Law enforcement officials identified him to US media.
Authorities ruled out any link to terror. But consternation grew over the safety gaps that allowed an airport worker to easily gain access to a commercial airliner and fly it over a major metropolitan area.
“Everybody’s stunned ... that something like this would happen,” said recently retired Horizon operational supervisor Rick Christenson.
“How could it? Everybody’s been through background checks.”
Russell “had access legitimately” to the plane, said Mike Ehl, director of aviation operations at the airport in the northwestern US state of Washington, adding that “no security violations were committed”.
Video taken by a bystander showed the 76-seat plane mak- ing a big, slow loop-the-loop as US Air Force F-15 jets gave chase, then flying low over Puget Sound before crashing into sparsely populated Ketron Island, setting trees on fire.
“To our knowledge, he didn’t have a pilot’s licence,” Gary Beck, CEO of Alaska Airlines affiliate Horizon, told reporters. “Commercial aircraft are complex machines … No idea how he achieved that experience.”
Russell’s role at Horizon, where he had worked since 2015, involved towing aircraft as part of a two-person team, in addition to loading and unloading cargo and luggage and cleaning the aircraft, according to Mr Beck.
Ruling out a terror link, Pierce County Sheriff Paul Pastor noted that “most terrorists don’t do loops over the water … This might have been a joy ride gone terribly wrong.”
Ed Troyer, of the sheriff’s office, described Russell as “su- icidal”. The plane was stolen about 8pm and crashed 90 minutes later, officials said.
The sheriff’s office said the F-15s arrived minutes after the plane was stolen and kept the aircraft “out of harm’s way and people on the ground safe”.
The fighter jets flew at supersonic speed, triggering a boom first taken to be an explosion, as they raced to intercept the plane.
John Waldron, who captured the plane’s loop-the-loop on video, told CNN he was out for an evening stroll and initially thought the aircraft was practising for an air show.
He estimated that the plane, at its lowest point, was no more than 30m above the water.
As Mr Russell nosedived toward the water, “We were all screaming, ‘Oh my god, oh my god!’ and I was yelling, ‘Pull up, pull up!’” Mr Christenson said.
In a conversation with the control tower, the pilot came a across as excitable, confused and even apologetic.
“Congratulations, you did it,” the control tower tells him, according to an audio feed aired on CNN.
“Let’s turn around the air and land it and not hurt anybody on the ground.”
“I don’t know, man,” the pilot answers. “I don’t want to. I was kind of hoping that was going to be it, you know.”
During the conversation, the man says he had put some fuel in the plane “to go check out the Olympics” — the Olympic Mountains that lie about 160km away.
But he later worried he was running low, saying the fuel had burned “quite a bit faster than I expected”.
The control tower urged him to land at a nearby military base.
“I wouldn’t want to do that. They probably have anti-aircraft,” he responds. “This is probably jail time for life, huh?” he later says, according to a recording published by The Seattle Times.
“I’ve got a lot of people that care about me. It’s going to disappoint them to hear that I did this,” he said.
“I would like to apologise to each and every one of them.
“Just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess.
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