A Suicide in Seattle
We may all wish for an explanation of why a ramp worker would steal an airliner and crash it. But it’s futile to expect one.
Now that it has sunk below the fold—or will have by the time you read this—the most surprising thing about Friday's bizarre stolen Q400 incident is that it wasn't streamed live on Facebook. Now that I've typed that, I realize someone will send a link saying, oh, but it was.
I've been scanning the domestic press for the inevitable overreaction, but thus far, it has not materialized. I haven't seen the shrill call for tighter security or more Rorschach and lie detector tests for ramp workers. Give it time, I guess. One reason might be that the entire thing was so utterly stupefying, it's difficult to think it through a full circle. Perhaps even the usual suspects who call for more rules, procedures and restrictions actually realize that this time.
Anyone in aviation won't be perplexed about how the worker—now named as 29-year-old Richard Russell—got across the ramp and into the airplane. Ramp workers are security cleared, dressed for success and have largely unfettered access to aircraft owned by the companies they work for. A challenge from a co-worker would be unlikely. The ramp is not necessarily a see something, say something kind of place.
Lighting up the airplane and actually taxiing it for takeoff struck me as, well, impressive. I remarked to a skydiver friend of mine that I have thousands of hours, an ATP and a little turboprop time and I doubt if I could even start the engines. Then, just for the hell of it, I unearthed the Q400 checklist on the web and … yes, there are six items on the pre-start. All labeled. Probably anyone with flying experience could do it. We don't know if Russell had any.
I saw a forum comment from a Q400 pilot who was likewise impressed with Russell's aerobatics in a 60,000-pound airplane. The loop, caught on the cellphones that make it impossible to do anything in modern life without digital immortality, finished breathtakingly close to the surface of Puget Sound. I'm certain I couldn't do that because I'd be too scared to try.
There will be an investigation, of course, which will describe the how and attempt to explain the why. But I can't imagine there will be a satisfactory explanation, just as there was no explanation for Andreas Lubitz crashing an Airbus with 150 people aboard into the French Alps in 2015. By explanation, I don't mean how Lubitz's known medical issues slipped through the screening gaps, but why one human's response to the demons of depression and mental illness is to take his own life along with 150 others.
In contrast, if you listen to the tape of Russell describing his torments, he seems … quite normal. Not agitated; just resigned. Tell me if you learned anything from listening, because I did not. It didn't take the online world long to manufacture the usual memes, which are meant to be funny but are really just mean. Personally, I couldn't summon so much as a smile. As a society, we're not always good at seizing the broken, the fallen and the weakened among us by the elbows and lifting them out of the dark before they do something to themselves or others that defies explanation. Often, we don't even know their names.
There are 7.4 billion people on the planet, any number of whom suffer from mental illnesses serious enough to contemplate suicide. In this case, one of them happened to intersect with the aviation world. And that's likely all the explanation there will ever be.--Paul Bertorelli
Because the nearest airport to me is largely a regional facility, feeding nearby hubs in Calgary, Vancouver and Seattle, I spend a lot of time on Q400s, including those owned by Horizon Airlines. Lacking anything else to do while the plane is prepared for taxi, I have, over the years, developed a mental checklist on the start procedure. It's not that I think I'll ever fly anything much bigger than the Cessna 140 that occasionally separates me from terra firma. But if the procedure is interrupted, I can usually predict whether we're waiting for a slot or headed back to the gate.
