Someone Just Stole a Passenger Plane Out of Sea-Tac And Has No Idea How to Land

Everything else
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I’m trying to confirm this, but Heavy is running with it

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Here’s ATC. They’re discussing the situation. Some flights are taking off, but others are being affected.

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Digital guy from local news channel

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King-5 Seattle is showing a smoke plume on the horizon

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The Heavy article at top has archived audio of the guy talking to ATC. He wanted to see the mountains. WTF???

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I realize it’s a little bit shitty to make this about me right now, but I’ve got a flight to the east coast leaving SeaTac at 7am, am I fucked?

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Nah, SeaTac is a major international hub. That was a prop puddle jumper, not a 747. You’ll be fine.

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Yeah but now I’m checking out the local news, and this was like a commercial flight, even if it wasn’t a jet airliner. Were there other passengers on the plane? Information is still pretty thin on the ground.

edit: local affiliate says no passengers, just some mechanic? This is nuts.

another edit: and now they’re calling this mechanic “suicidal”.

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It sounds like he was an Alaska/Horizon mechanic and had access to the plane. And he wanted to see the mountains and Puget Sound. So he basically took it up and…

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It was a Bombardier Q400; a sizeable prop plane

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Lost the tweet, but sources from JBLM are saying the plane nose-dived into the island after the F-15s started talking to the pilot.

It’s not a heavily-populated island, but there are houses on it. I hope those folks are all okay.

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I’ve never even heard of Ketron Island, there’s a Pierce County sheriff on the news right now saying maybe a dozen people live there. There’s footage of a fire that’s still burning from the crash, but I don’t see any homes near it, as best I can tell.

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There are a bunch of tiny islands like that all over Puget Sound. They’re nowhere near large enough to warrant ferry service from the state, so it’s almost impossible to visit them unless you own a boat of your own. But if you’re wealthy enough, you can have someone ship a ton of building material to the island, and you own your own boat to visit the mainland. Some of the larger ones have a little private ferry, but nothing like the big roll-on/roll-off jumbo ferries.

Look on Google maps and there are a few roads on the island, and the structures are all spaced fairly distant from one another.

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Yikes. This could have turned out so much worse. It sounds like the Malaysian Flight 370 pilot on a less homicidal scale.

-Tom