OLYMPIA, Wash. — Investigators are piecing together how an airline ground agent stole an empty commercial airplane, took off from Sea-Tac International Airport and crashed into a small island in the Puget Sound after being chased by military jets that were quickly scrambled to intercept the aircraft.
Officials said Saturday that the man was a 3.5-year Horizon Airlines employee and had clearance to be among aircraft, but that to their knowledge, he wasn’t a licensed pilot. A U.S. official told The Associated Press the man was 29-year-old Richard Russell. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Video showed the Horizon Air Q400, a turboprop plane that seats 76 people, doing large loops and other dangerous maneuvers as the sun set on Puget Sound.
Two F-15C aircraft were scrambled from Portland and pursued the plane but authorities say they didn’t fire on it before it crashed on tiny Ketron Island, southwest of Tacoma, Washington.
“It is highly fragmented,” Debra Eckrote, the Western Pacific regional chief for the National Transportation Safety Board, said of the plane.
Investigators expect they will be able to recover both the cockpit voice recorder and the event data recorder from the plane. Russell is presumed to have died in the crash.
He could be heard on audio recordings telling air traffic controllers that he is “just a broken guy.”
An air traffic controller tried to convince him to land the airplane.
“There is a runway just off to your right side in about a mile,” the controller says, referring to an airfield at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
“Oh man. Those guys will rough me up if I try and land there,” the man responded, later adding “This is probably jail time for life, huh?”
Later the man said: “I’ve got a lot of people that care about me. It’s going to disappoint them to hear that I did this … Just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess.”
