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Seattle hijacker’s plane heist, midair stunts and fiery crash expose gaps in aviation security
A Horizon Air employee described as “suicidal” stole an empty plane at Seattle’s airport and crashed it into a nearby island on Aug. 10.
The 29-year-old hijacker was performing midair stunts over Puget Sound, an erratic flight pattern that seemed to mirror the loops and barrel rolls of his radio chatter.
He told the control tower he was “a broken guy” but a lot of people cared about him and he wanted to apologize. He asked the whereabouts of an orca whale and her dead calf. And he wondered — laughing — what would happen if he tried to do a “backflip” with the plane he had stolen from Seattle’s main airport.
When the control tower urged him to attempt to land the empty, 76-seat Bombardier Q400 belonging to his employer, Horizon Air, the man — identified by a law enforcement official as Richard Russell — worried about harm to others on the ground. Better to take a nose dive, he said, “and call it a night.”
The stunning heist of a large commercial airplane from a major U.S. airport Friday night took no other lives than the pilot’s, but the incident has heightened worries about gaps in American aviation security, forcing questions about how Russell, a baggage handler and grounds crew member, could take control of the aircraft, get it in the air and fly it willy-nilly over a major U.S. metropolitan area for nearly an hour.
As he flew in loops and zigzags into the sunset with Air Force F-15s shadowing him, spectators on the ground followed him across the sky with their phones, thinking it was an air show.
Within minutes of the theft, the two F-15s were scrambled and were in the air, flying at supersonic speeds from their Portland air base to intercept the aircraft, according to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which oversees airspace protection in North America.
The jets were armed but did not fire on the aircraft, said Air Force Capt. Cameron Hillier, a NORAD spokesman. Officials declined to describe the circumstances in which they would bring down an aircraft with a missile, citing operational security, but Hillier did say any decision would involve “a lot of collaboration” between pilots, commanders on the ground and others.
The F-15 pilots attempted to divert the aircraft toward the Pacific Ocean while maintaining radio communication with controllers and Russell. The jets flew close enough to make visual contact, Hillier said.
Russell eventually told controllers that fuel was low and an engine was failing. Then he plunged the aircraft into a wooded area on sparsely inhabited Ketron Island, 25 miles south of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, setting trees ablaze. Russell is presumed dead in what authorities described as “a suicide.”
Federal officials released few details Saturday about the hijacking, but airline executives said Russell had been an employee since 2015, and he possessed security clearances to gain access to the plane. He was also familiar with the towing tractors that move aircraft on the tarmac. He used one to back the plane out of a maintenance area, then climbed into the cockpit and roared down the runway.
Brad Tilden, the CEO of Alaska Airlines, which owns Horizon Air, told reporters Saturday the incident “is going to push us to learn from this tragedy and make sure this does not happen again at Alaska or any other airline.”
But he and other airline executives declined to say what measures they could take to prevent someone with security badges from doing it
again.
again.
Tilden said his industry operates on the principle of checking the backgrounds of employees, not locking down airplanes in secure areas.
“The doors to the airplanes are not keyed like a car,” he said.
Congress is already seeking to tighten the screening of airport employees and may do so with more urgency now, said Mary Schiavo, the former inspector general of the U.S. Transportation Department.
The United States has approximately 900,000 aviation workers, according to the most recent federal data, and Schiavo said screening procedures are “pretty rudimentary.”
While pilots undergo periodic medical exams, she noted, airline mechanics and ground crew members are checked on a much more limited basis that does not include mental health exams.
Though aircraft mechanics have broad access and routinely taxi planes along the tarmac, Schiavo said, ground crew members are not supposed to be allowed inside cockpits, which have locking doors. But she said those security procedures are not always observed, especially for smaller commuter aircraft such as the Bombardier Q400. “It can be a little more casual and a little loosey-goosey, especially if they are doing overnight maintenance,” she said.
Authorities were quick to assure the public that Friday’s incident was not viewed as an act of terrorism. But the apparent ease with which the Horizon employee stole the plane points to the challenge of stopping “inside threat” attacks.
Richard Bloom, an aviation security expert at Arizona’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said he wasn’t aware of another incident in the United States in which a ground crew member managed to steal an airplane. Incidents of aviation workers attempting to aid terrorists or drug traffickers are far more common globally.
But setting up a comprehensive screening system to evaluate the mental health of aviation workers would be difficult, Bloom cautioned, and would risk rejecting large numbers of workers who do not pose a danger.
“There are such significant challenges to preventing inappropriate security behavior,” he said. “It’s kind of surprising that these types of things don’t happen more often.”
A bipartisan House bill, approved last year, calls for more stringent standards in employee background checks and increased surveillance of secure areas at airports. A Senate version of the bill has yet to come up for a vote.
The bill followed a February 2017 House Homeland Security Committee report warning of vulnerabilities that could allow terrorists and criminals to get jobs as aviation workers. Concerns over mental health were not a focus of the report.
But those worries have increased in recent years, analysts say, particularly after the 2015 crash of a Germanwings flight, whose co-pilot deliberately steered the plane into a French mountainside, killing 144 passengers and five crew members.
The co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had been treated for depression and psychiatric problems but concealed the information from his employer. Once the flight was airborne, Lubitz locked his more senior pilot out of the cockpit.
Gary Beck, the CEO of Horizon Air, told reporters he didn’t know whether Russell was trained as a pilot, but he called the flight “incredible.”
At one point, an air traffic controller urged Russell to land at the airfield of a nearby military base, Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
“Oh man,” Russell said, “Those guys will rough me up if I try and land there. I think I might mess something up there, too. I wouldn’t want to do that.”
Russell described his experience flying in video games and asked for the coordinates to the orca whale that has been pushing her dead calf through Washington state’s coastal waters for nearly three weeks.
“You know, the mama orca with the baby,” he said. “I want to go see that guy.”
The Air Force pilot who flew his attack jet into a Colorado mountainside last year was in mental turmoil over ''unrequited love'' for a former girlfriend and over his mother's Christian pacifist faith, a ''psychological autopsy'' by the Air Force has concluded.
Air Force officials found last year, basically for lack of a better explanation, that the 32-year-old pilot, Capt. Craig D. Button, committed suicide when, on April 2, 1997, he broke formation from his unit instead of proceeding on a training run and then flew from southern Arizona to the Colorado Rockies.
But the psychological report, which was released earlier this month because of legally enforceable requests made by The Tucson Citizen under the Freedom of Information Act, was an effort to explain why. It was based on interviews with about 200 people -- friends, fellow fliers and relatives.
A separate section of the report deals with another mystery surrounding the flight: what ever happened to the four 500-pound bombs that were on board the plane? They were never found, and loud explosions in northern Arizona and near the Colorado mountain towns of Telluride and Aspen that were heard by 58 witnesses cited in the report indicate that Captain Button may have dumped them.
The bombs were to have been used in the training run, in what would have been the first time that Captain Button had ever dropped live ordnance.
The pilot's parents, Richard and Joan Button of Massapequa, N.Y., angrily reject the conclusion that he committed suicide.
''They pulled that out of a hat: that he must have done it himself, which I think is a lie,'' Mr. Button said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Button, who served in the Air Force during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War before retiring as a lieutenant colonel, noted that his son's plane broke from formation just after it had been refueled in the air.
''There must have been some kind of air contamination,'' Mr. Button said, suggesting that his son had been stricken by fumes from the jet fuel. ''We think he was disoriented, that he wasn't able to control his airplane for a period of time. We think that caused the accident.''
At the crash site, just below the summit of a 13,365-foot-high granite peak in the Holy Cross Wilderness, a vast tract of national forest near Vail, investigators looking at the possibility suggested by Mr. Button did not recover enough human remains to determine whether his son had suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning. (They did conclude that he had not been using drugs or alcohol before the crash.)
But, in discounting an accident resulting from disorientation or loss of consciousness, the investigators noted that well after the refueling, Captain Button's A-10 Thunderbolt climbed from an altitude of 6,000 feet and threaded its way through 14,000-foot-high peaks.
An avid skier, Captain Button had skied in the Colorado Rockies, had been reprimanded by the Air Force for often going out of his way to fly over the Rockies and had talked of one day leaving the Air Force to fly commercial jets out of Denver. On his final flight, Craig Button, a New York City native, roared over New York Lake at 300 miles an hour, passed within two miles of Craig Mountain and crashed into Gold Dust Peak.
The Air Force report -- which was released only after the service's Office of Special Investigations had blackened out the names of almost everyone interviewed -- sketches a picture of a ''perfectionist'' who was inwardly torn by his relationships with his mother and a former girlfriend.
Craig Button, it says, reared as an only child of elderly parents, broke as a teen-ager with his parents' faith. His mother was a Jehovah's Witness, and his father had joined the denomination after retiring from the Air Force.
''My mother is a Jehovah's Witness, raised me to think that joining the military is wrong,'' Craig Button wrote to a commander as a 23-year-old Air Force R.O.T.C. cadet at the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, N.Y.
And an old classmate from the R.O.T.C. program told an Air Force investigator that Mrs. Button ''would not allow him to wear his R.O.T.C. uniform in the house.''
The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, a Jehovah's Witness group that arranged the telephone interview with Mr. Button, provided this statement on the denomination's faith and military service: ''Jehovah's Witnesses choose to abide by the principle outlined in the Bible to 'beat their swords into plowshares.' However, they do not interfere with or oppose individuals who choose to serve in the military.''
In any event, the pilot's half-sister, Susane Button, told an investigator that his mother had wanted him ''to leave the military for the airlines.''
And Lieut. Brian Gross, a pilot who shared an apartment with Captain Button at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, near Tucson, Ariz., said that in the month before he disappeared, his ''mother became increasingly vocal in her negative feelings towards her son's job and role in the military.''
Captain Button revered his father and his father's half-brother, Lieut. Donald Hurlburt. Lieutenant Hurlburt, a B-17 pilot who flew over Germany in World War II, was killed when he crashed in Florida in 1943. Hurlburt Field, an Air Force base in Florida, is named for him.
But in the weeks before Captain Button's crash, he seemed to some people to have become disillusioned with his life in the military. Questioned by an investigator, a former landlord in Texas recalled that in two telephone conversations before his death, the pilot seemed ''out of character,'' saying he was ''learning to kill people.''
Mrs. Button has declined to be interviewed by reporters about her son's death. But she talked with Air Force investigators on April 17, 1997, two weeks after his plane's disappearance and nearly two weeks before his remains were found.
''She advised there were no arguments with her son over religion during their visit in Tucson,'' the Air Force interviewer wrote, referring to a weeklong visit by the parents that ended, apparently amicably, one week before Captain Button's last flight.
In the telephone interview, his father said that Captain Button had got along well with his mother during the visit and that he had talked enthusiastically about a coming transfer to Germany. ''There were no arguments between the two,'' Richard Button said. ''There were no flare-ups, no extreme arguments relating to any faith.''
Another source of turmoil for the young pilot, the report said, was a ''lost love'' for a former classmate who three years earlier had turned down his vague proposal of marriage. By 1996, the captain was telling his friends that he had got over this woman, who at that point was an Air Force flight instructor. But around Christmas 1996, the woman, who was coming out of another relationship, called him.
Later, the captain told a friend that he had thrown away her Christmas card unread, proof, he said, that he had got over the relationship. But on Tuesday, April 1, 1997, he broke a three-month silence and called her. She was in a work meeting but took down his new telephone number and said she would call him back. Just the day before, Captain Button had bought a videocassette recorder and a copy of ''The Bridges of Madison County,'' one of his favorite movies, about a doomed love affair.
It was not until four days after the crash that the woman, apparently unaware that he had disappeared, returned his call.
The Air Force report concludes, ''It was a dramatic example of a man who seems to have everything going for him in his life, yet cannot have the woman he loves passionately.'' Referring to the male lead in the movie, the report adds, ''Did Craig Button see himself in this Clint Eastwood role?''
Resources: Contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline for 24-hour, confidential assistance if you or someone you know needs help: 1-800-273-TALK (8255), suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.
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