Well I’m off to the airport, wish me luck.
A bunch of audio clips in that twitter thread from his ATC conversations.
It’s really quite sad. It almost sounds like he got one of those “call of the void” urgings and once he committed he was doomed. Dude was only 29.
The discussion with ATC when he realizes he’s really low on fuel…
“I’m not quite ready to bring it down just yet,” Rich said. “But holy smokes, I got to stop looking at the fuel, because it’s going down quick.”
“Could you start a left turn and we’ll take you down to the SE, please,” the air-traffic controller then asked.
“This is probably jail time for life, huh?” said Rich. “I would hope it is for a guy like me.”
“Oh, Richard,” said the controller, “We’re not going to worry or think about that. But could you start a left turn please?”
He almost crashed into Chambers Bay, which is a popular and scenic golf course (it hosted the 2015 US Open). Tons of people were catching him on their phones there, including a wedding party.
Seems like business as usual at SeaTac from a flyer’s perspective. Security line seemed longer than usual but moved quickly.
Actually, a barrel roll is just a roll, no real altitude change. He actually did a split-S and came within about 100 feet of the water. Crazy.
Wish he’d managed to land, after hearing the ATC.
He even threw up at one point.
Dude bit off more than he could chew in the end.
Sort of amazes you how the Barefoot Bandit is still alive.
Didn’t they catch the barefoot bandit? Also, hi from Chicago!
You’re in Chicago, and I’m in the PNW. It’s a world gone mad!
Also I apologize in advance for the inevitable delay you’re about to face since you’re probably at O’hare.
Yes indeed but lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, I’ll be on my way to sunny Florida in a couple hours.
I’m catching up on the story and I see they’ve got transcripts and recordings up with this guy’s talks with air traffic control and man, this story is even more tragic than it seemed, Guy just sounds so in over his head, I don’t like to play armchair psychiatrist but I wonder if he just had some mental break or something. That air traffic controller was trying so hard to get that guy safely back on the ground.
Edit: sorry about all the run-on sentences, I’m posting off the cuff on my phone
That was very sad. He seemed quite nice.
Yeah, that audio is heart-breaking. You get the sense that a health care worker, say someone from a suicide hotline, could have talked him through whatever he was dealing with.
-Tom
What’s even sadder is that I’ve listened to that audio a bunch, and I don’t really get suicide out of it. I mean, maybe the poor guy had a breakdown of sorts that led to him stealing the plane and taking off, but my takeaway is that he got the thing up there and then realized he had no idea at all about how to land it. Listening to the recordings I hear the fear of even trying to land it, combined with declining fuel and finally with what might’ve been some hypoxia to make him less and less rational as things went.
When you REALLY REALLY want to fly a plane but don’t have the money…
I mean…it just seems like he did this as kind of a lark, and figured he could handle the plane. Got it aloft without problems…and then began to realize just how much of a problem he’d created.
He sounded obviously troubled. Suicidal? No clue, but certainly either under the influence and/or not in the right state of mind. Then again, you’d kind of have to be to steal an airliner.
Look he flew planes in video games, and he managed to do a split S. Which is harder in real life (low time pilot here) than in video game. The few times I tried do a barrel roll were pretty miserable failures and yet the guy did a perfect one. I just came to the part where he wanted to look at the Orca pod that was in the area started cracking up. Then heard the part about him saying lot of people cared about him and apologizing to them that was sad.
James Fallows has interesting piece on the incident.
The Seattle Plane Crash: Lessons and Questions - The Atlantic.
Great Piece Strollen. More European hand-wringing on the lack of child-proofing everything in the United States:
For instance, from the UK’s Telegraph , soon after the event: “It has raised fundamental questions about airline security at America’s major airports after the mechanic was able to board the plane, taxi onto the runway and take off without being stopped. Aviation experts questioned what the authorities would have been able to do if the pilot was determined to fly the plane into a city rather than do loop-the-loops.”
Followed by this nugget:
The most useful overall summary I’ve seen is in The Aviationist . It gives details about the plane (a Horizon Air Bombardier Dash 8 twin-engine turboprop, with no passengers aboard but capable of carrying more than 70); the route of flight; the response of Air Traffic Control; and the dispatch of two F-15 fighter jets from the Oregon Air National Guard’s base, in Portland, which broke the sound barrier en route toward Seattle and were prepared if necessary to shoot down the errant plane.
The F-15s were there within minutes after his unauthorized takeoff and forced him over sparsely populated areas. Pretty stellar work by the Oregon Air National Guard. The Aviationist article above has photos of the 15’s taking off on afterburner with full AAM loadouts.
They weren’t playing.