Turns out he was ground crew:
There’s more coverage at this local news site, too:
If anyone sees info about his flight path from SeaTac, please post. I’m just curious. Ketron Island is straight south from the airport, but I heard reports of sightings inland. He must’ve made a left turn east, then veered west at some point. He never went over my house (about ten miles south of the airport).
Tacoma Narrows Airport is within about ten miles of where he crashed. According to the figures I could find, the runway there is long enough for a Q400, but not by a lot. With a novice pilot that would probably be asking for trouble. It’s civilian, at least. What direction was he going when he crashed? If it was north, maybe he was trying to line up for a landing there.
Tacoma Narrows is where I got my license. Haven’t been by there in ages, though.
All of that information is there in the world and accessible to someone who really wants to learn it, and is sufficiently motivated to self-study.
Pilot handbooks/user manuals aren’t that hard to get ahold of. I used to routinely get a new one every time I tried out a new airplane (about twice a year on average when I was still an active pilot)
Information frequencies, taxi information and the like are published routinely and easily available because you want pilots to have easy access to such information. There are tons of on-line articles about radio procedures you can use for self-study.
Most flight simulators these days have options to set real weather, real airports and their procedures, simulated ATC, and aircraft parameters. Heck, I was doing that on my home PC back in the last 1990’s while learning to fly.
It’s cliche… but it’s not rocket science. (At least not until you get to jets. This one was a turbo-prop.)
Or disciplined about self-study.
Undoubtedly.
Amen to the last sentence. I strongly suspect that even though there’s no evidence that he was a licensed pilot, he had at least a few flying lessons somewhere along the way.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if he booby-trapped his home, like the Colorado theater shooter did.
p.s. Does anyone else remember when a teenage boy stole an airplane not all that long after 9/11, and crashed the plane into a building? IIRC, it was on a weekend so the building was mostly unoccupied, and damage was relatively minimal because it was a puddle-jumper.
More detailed audio. I admire the persistence and affability of the guys who were trying to cajole him to come down. It’s not something you can train much for.
Isn’t scrambling fighters whenever there is a possible hijacking or suspicion of one SOP since 9/11? I was glad to see them up there myself.
And no matter how bad off the poor guy was, let’s give him credit for doing this by himself and not with a plane full of passengers like the guy in Germany.
If you fly out of Portland, you’ll see these guys training. They take it seriously.
Makes me wonder what would have happened if he landed the thing.
I’ve seen them while flying my plane near Klamath Falls. Last time ATC called me up and said a pair of F-15s at 600kts was going to be passing me on the left and they had me in sight. It was just enough time to snap a picture.
He was going south. He did a barrel roll over Chambers Bay then flew south to Ketron.
A Classic Suicide.
Depth perception this that video is tricky, but if I had to give a name to to what he did, I’d say he tried for an aileron roll end ended up with a split s.
I agree. He has tried a roll but hasn’t got the nose anywhere near high enough to begin with. During the roll the nose has dropped and he’s ended up in a steep dive about 3/4 the way through at which point he seems to have decided to just pull rather than continue rolling.
I agree.
The press is trying to turn this story into something of greater significance than it is. It was a dramatic suicide, maybe starting out as just a lark by someone with some kind of problem, but clearly he intended no harm to others. I wish he hadn’t done it, don’t want to encourage it, but grudgingly have to tip my hat to a guy who went out with style.
Long article on Richard Russell. He seemed like a normal guy. Well traveled, wife and loving family.
There’s no indication that he’d do something like this.
I can only guess the joyride was done on impulse. Then everything quickly spiraled out of control. He had committed a serious crime and the situation seemed hopeless. That’s just my conjecture. I’m not convinced this started as a suicide plan.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree Ace.
Well, Richard did reject any attempt to land.
The joyride ended in a suicide as he attempted air stunts that a novice could never complete.
Only he knew his original intentions at the beginning.
Well of course it fucking doesn’t.
He said he didn’t plan on landing, which does suggest he was suicidal. He seems like a good guy. He may have done us a favor exposing how easy it is to steal a plane with that job. Imagine if he’d wanted to hurt people.