He was a jokester, but friends still baffled by thief’s airplane heist
SEATTLE – Alio Fan woke up the morning of Aug. 11 and clicked on a voice recording someone had sent him. It was his childhood friend, Richard Russell, talking to air traffic controllers, a conversation that was then broadcast all over the world.
“Rolling out of bed and hearing his voice,” Fan recalled, “My initial reaction was, ‘Oh what kind of prank is he playing. This is going to be hilarious.’”
The Russell he knew had always been a jokester, the class clown. “I just thought it was another one of his jokes,” Fan said.
Less than two weeks after Russell stole a 76seat passenger plane from Seattle-tacoma International Airport, traversing the Puget Sound region for more than an hour before crashing to his death on Ketron Island, there are few hints as to why he did it or how he was able to fly a commercial airplane. Friends and former colleagues can’t comprehend how the smart, funny, quiet man they knew could have carried out such a shocking heist.
Mike Criss, a family friend, whose son had been close friends with Russell since second grade, said that he’d last talked to Russell in February.
“He sounded just perfectly fine,” Criss, referring to Russell by his nickname, told the Anchorage Daily News, which worked in cooperation with The Seattle Times on this story. “Just the same old Beebo.”
Criss said his son talked to Russell the week before the Aug. 10 crash and nothing seemed amiss.
Russell’s family has declined to comment beyond a statement issued the day after the crash. “This is a complete shock to us,” his family wrote.
A man who answered the door at the Graham home of Russell’s motherin-law last Wednesday made it clear that the family did not intend to comment further.
David Odell, pastor at Russell’s Auburn church, also declined to discuss Russell, citing the family’s wishes. “In the statement where it says it’s a complete shock, it’s just 100 percent true,” Odell said.
Russell, 29, was born in Key West, Fla., and moved to Wasilla, Alaska, when he was 7, according to a blog he created for an online communications class at Washington State University. Criss said that Russell never talked about planes or flying as a kid.
He played football and competed in track and field at Wasilla High School, according to a local newspaper, graduating in 2008. He moved to Coos Bay, Ore., attending Southwestern Richard Russell’s Youtube channel shows Russell, an airline ground agent.
Oregon Community College, where he met Hannah Stracener at a church gathering in 2010. They married a year later and then opened a bakery that they ran together for three years.
They rose together at 5 a.m., preparing breads and pastries in a shop that was little more than an oven, a sink and a couple counters, according to an article at the time from the Coos Bay World. They had different personalities. Hannah, who had gone to culinary school, was “detail oriented” and ran the show, the newspaper reported, while her husband was more laid-back and “eager to experiment with new and wild recipes.”
They moved to Sumner in 2015, to be nearer to her family, Russell wrote on the blog, and he got a job working for Horizon Air. He also enrolled at WSU, and graduated in 2017 with a degree in social sciences, the registrar said.
Russell was a groundservice agent at Horizon, part of a two-person “tow team” that turned around airplanes. He was regularly alone in cockpits, for stretches that ranged from 10 to 45 minutes. He turned on planes’ auxiliary power units (essentially the battery), communicated with air traffic controllers and would have used the planes’ brakes in an emergency, but would never have turned on the engines or propellers, former co-workers said.
Mary Schiavo, an aviation attorney and former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, noted that pilots are never alone in the cockpit, always required to be joined by a colleague, but ground-service agents enter the cockpit alone, with their partner driving the pushback tractor on the ground.
Russell’s dramatic theft and crash prompted increased security checks at Sea-tac and calls for a nationwide review of security measures.
Former co-workers describe a quiet, friendly guy who read a lot and liked the free travel perks that came with working for an
airline. But four former ground-service agents who worked with him keyed in on one line from the cockpit recording, a complaint about wages and a dig at management.
“Minimum wage, we’ll chalk it up to that,” Russell said on the flight radio to air traffic controllers. “Maybe that will grease some gears a little bit with the higher-ups.”
Russell’s former coworkers described Horizon as an often unpleasant place to work, where workers were pushed hard, underappreciated and carried a sense of grievance that they were paid less than Seatac’s much-publicized $15 an hour minimum wage.
It’s a complaint that Russell himself echoed in social-media postings, noting the dichotomy between a grueling, lowpaying job and the globetrotting trips that the job let him take.
“I never thought I would work as a ground service agent,” Russell wrote. “It seemed like such miserable work and I never could imagine why anyone would want to subject themselves to all the constant noise, gas fumes, and heavy lifting … I would like to dedicate this blog to the life of a ‘ramper’ and highlight the remarkable contrast between our work and rest.”