Humans don't have wings, so flying should be left to the professionals

 

There was a tragic plane crash in Puget Sound earlier this month when a floatplane unaccountably nose-dived at high speed into the water and exploded, quickly disappearing beneath the waves with the body of only one of the ten passengers initially found. It took another ten days for searchers to discover this part of the wreckage…

 

…under almost 200 feet of water in relatively fast underwater currents, which will require unmanned underwater vehicles to conduct recovery operations, and it will take a few years before it is determined what caused the accident. Although the floatplane was 55 years old, it’s model is said to have an excellent safety record and there was some surprise that even with engine failure, an experienced pilot should have been able to glide it onto the water with minimal damage or injury.

I wondered if Puget Sound was some sort of “Devil’s Triangle” because of the region has a notorious weather phenomenon called the Puget Sound Convergence Zone. Some guy speculated on the website Iowaclimate.org that sudden shifts in air flow due to the convergence zone at the precise time and location of the crash might have caused the accident: “Not only did the wind reverse suddenly, but there would have been considerable turbulence due to the strong vertical wind shear associated with the convergence/windshift line.”

The website https://planecrashmap.com  lists fatal aircraft crashes in each state from April 1982 through September 2018. During this period, the state of Washington saw 1183 fatal plane crashes, almost all of them smaller private planes. That seems an awful lot to me; while that is much less than California (4742), Texas (2751), Florida (2649) and even Alaska (2051) where because of the weather and terrain, use of small aircraft is common for travel. Only two other states—Arizona and Colorado—had more fatal plane crashes than Washington. This map of crash locations indicates that while it doesn’t appear that many planes actually crashed into the water, a majority were clustered around the Sound:

 

That wasn’t the only recent aviation news. People may remember the infamous “Barefoot Bandit” case, in which a local youth named Colton Harris Moore apparently lived from the age of 7 as a literal “wild child” with significant psychological disorders, and even at that young age began breaking into vacation homes, was accused of at least a hundred thefts in the state alone, stealing anything from food to a Cessna plane. After he escaped from a juvenile detention center, authorities eventually caught up with him after he flew another stolen plane to the Bahamas, and a boat he stole to complete his escape had its engine disabled. Moore’s “celebrity” was such that he was paroled from prison early and is allegedly working a “clerical” job for a law firm.

What is fascinating about this is that Moore had learned how to fly a plane on his own, through manuals and videos. Most people; one may suspect, would believe that you have to be profoundly self-confident, profoundly delusional or profoundly suicidal to think you can just jump into a plane, start it up, and go off into the wide blue yonder without a care in the world. More likely, you could just jump out the window of the 100^th floor of a skyscraper or bail out of plane without a parachute and get the same “high.” It takes more skill to land a plane than actually get it off the ground or fly it, which is why the people who turned out to be the 9-11 hijackers aroused suspicion when their flight training didn’t include landing a plane.

Landing a plane was also not the forte of Richard Russell, of whom after four years since his amateur flight, the FBI released classified documents from the case this past July. Russell commandeered a 103-seat Alaska Airlines Horizon turbo-prop plane at Sea-Tac Airport on August 10, 2018 and appeared to fly the plane with the apparent skill and daring one would expect of an aerobatic performer. Russell flew the plane for 73 minutes until an engine shut down for low fuel, and was apparently in complete control of the aircraft even as he did stunts like this:

 

Of course landing the plane was another matter; although he was urged to land at McChord Airbase or attempt a water landing, he is seen here apparently deliberately heading for a crash on Ketron Island as dusk was falling:

 

Even last year, three years after the incident, Rolling Stone was still fascinated enough with the case to publish a profile of Russell by Tim Dickinson. Russell was described as just a friendly guy no one would have suspected anything like this to happen. However, a pilot named Joel Monteith had seen Russell acting “suspiciously” in previous encounters: Russell once wanted to watch his pre-flight routine in the cockpit, and had seen him on another occasion “flipping switches.”  Monteith “speculated” that Russell hadn’t been planning on actually flying a plane, but that he must have “been thinking about doing this for a long time, and . . . the Q400 that he took was just an airplane of opportunity.” 

 
In the days leading up to the hijacking, he seemed “off” to family and co-workers; but on the day of the incident he just seemed back to “normal,” with no particular issues, although along with his colleagues he complained of the workload as a baggage hander and the low pay. In this compilation of surveillance video footage released by a local television station this past July, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY0EUs_8Ubo , it was just a “normal” day, and no one appeared to be suspicious of what Russell was up to until the air traffic controller and other pilots started wondering what that plane was doing on the runway.  

 
Having worked on the ramp at Sea-Tac Airport myself for seven years, if I had been watching Russell and knew that his job description was handling baggage, I would have wondered what he was doing at the point he was seen in the cockpit starting the engine and then would have been more concerned him seeing him pushing the airplane onto the ramp not just by himself, but without a guide, which was simply not done. But if I didn’t know who he was or what his job was, I might have thought he was a mechanic who was authorized to “drive” the plane to a hangar for repairs. 

 
Of course traffic control would have had to be notified of that as well, and when the plane found its way onto the runway something was obviously wrong. It was noted that as the plane was rolling down the runway for takeoff, whoever was flying it didn’t disengage the “parking brakes” as the tires began to visibly smoke. However, after the failure to receive a response and the plane made what appeared to be a routine take-off by someone who at least knew how to do that, two F-15s were scrabbled from Portland and arrived on the scene in 15 minutes. 

 
Russell’s first transmission 10 minutes into the flight revealed that he wasn’t a terrorist bent on flying the plane into a building, but some “joker” on a joy ride. His first intelligible words were “Man, I’m a ground-service agent! I don’t know what that is.” He went on to say that he just wanted to “start it up [and] get it to go — a couple of hours, I guess.” But getting the plane into the air and flying it was the “easy” part, and he admitted “Um, yeah, I wouldn’t know how to land it. I wasn’t really planning on landing it. I just kinda wanna do a couple maneuvers — see what it can do before I put her down, ya know?” 

 
Throughout the flight, the path of which is provided here in the Rolling Stone piece... 

 

 

...Russell seemed to veer from confident swagger to nervous concern about the “end game.” He admitted “losing his lunch” hitting turbulence flying over Mount Rainier, but then bragged about his flying skills: “Oh, hell yeah! It’s a blast, man. I’ve played video games before so, ya know, I know what I’m doin’ a little bit.” However, he continued to keep his mind off of how this was going to end, announcing that “I think I got some gas to go check out the Olympics.” 

 
A pilot was found to talk him back down to earth, but Russell didn’t seem ready or willing to do that, or if he could even do it if he was able to follow instructions. According to the Rolling Stone piece, “The controller advised Russell to begin planning his landing. This was a daunting suggestion. The Q400 is designed to climb sharply out of small airports; its engines are high-powered when the plane is full and even more powerful when empty. Pilots jokingly refer to it as the ‘Crash 8’ because of how difficult it is to land.” 

 
When told to land at McChord, Russell demurred, claiming he feared being “shot down” or “roughed up.” Even as he expressed concern about how fast his fuel gauge was dropping, he seemed more concerned about what would happen if he got out of this alive: “This is probably like jail time for life, huh? I mean, I would hope it is for a guy like me.” 

 
Russell then announced that he was getting “lightheaded” and wanted to know how to “pressurize” the cabin. Perhaps the lack of oxygen was affecting his thinking, because he then proclaimed “Hey, you think if I land this successfully Alaska will give me a job as pilot?” But in a moment of reflection as he was set on “visiting” the Olympic Mountains, he admitted that  “I got a lot of people that care about me, and it’s going to disappoint them to hear that I did this. I would like to apologize to each and every one of them…just a broken guy. Got a few screws loose, I guess. Never really knew it till now.” 

 
Still trying to avoid the inevitable, Russell then proclaimed as darkness was falling “Hey, pilot guy? Can this thing do a backflip, ya think? I’m gonna try to do a barrel roll, and if that goes good, then I’ll just nose down and call it a night.” What he meant by this is open to conjecture, since it seems clear that Russell didn’t begin this “adventure” with the idea that he might die, and someone was going to help him get out of this mess. He just hadn’t thought that far ahead. He confessed to enjoying the sights, but then admitted “But, uh, I think they’re prettier in a different context”—perhaps meaning in the “next world.” 

 
He then does the “barrel roll”—sending the plane into a backflip as seen in the image above, and just managing to level off a few feet above the water. Those who watched this were certain that although Russell had no “formal” training, he must have spent hours “practicing” this maneuver on a flight simulator program to have performed it so well. Still, reality had to kick-in, and not long afterward Russell reported that he wouldn’t be in the air “for long” and that one of the engines had stopped before diving into Ketron Island; the crash started a two-acre fire. Russell was killed instantly with “multiple traumatic injuries.” An image in the unclassified FBI report shows what appears to be one of Russell’s shoes amongst the debris.

 

 

 

 

The lesson here is that humans don't have wings, and there are things that should be left to the professionals for a reason.