”I just wanna do a couple maneuvers - see what it can do before I put her down, ya know?” “I wasn’t really planning on landing it,” Russell told air-traffic control from the cockpit. “The plane had direct and immediate access to a runway going the right direction for takeoff,” Wendy Reiter, director of aviation security for SeaTac, would later testify. Far to his right, near the empty co-pilot’s seat, he slid up the levers for each of the propellers, producing a satisfying roar. “Even if the guard . . . had witnessed these actions,” it reads, “the time frame was too short to have precluded the Horizon employee’s entry to the cabin of the aircraft.”īack in the cockpit, Russell faced a confounding control panel. And the report from the Port of Seattle, which runs Sea Tac, underscores that only Russell’s short sprint back to the moving airplane would have raised alarms. The lone security guard in the area was attending to an arriving vehicle at a nearby entrance gate. “There didn’t seem to be anything that was out of the ordinary - up until the last minute when he actually took it,” he says. He tells Rolling Stone that Russell’s “brazen” theft of the Q400 was hidden in plain sight on the busy tarmac. Matt Scott was the FBI’s case agent for the investigation. He then hopped out, reboarded the tug, and swiveled the plane toward the taxiway. Although trained to start the aircraft’s auxiliary power unit, Russell exceeded all authorization - toggling levers and switches in sequence to fire up the engines. At 7:15 p.m., he hooked the tug to the front of the Q400, tossed aside the wheel blocks, and boarded the plane. The biggest impediment Russell faced is that maneuvering a parked plane is a two-man job, and he had no accomplice. There was no lock on the door of the airplane. Russell’s employee badge gave him access to both the tug and the remote cargo area.
The plane, with seating for 76, had completed its last scheduled flight for the day around noon, a 23-minute jump from British Columbia’s Vancouver Island to Seattle, across the Salish Sea. Wearing a weathered yellow-and-orange reflective vest, Russell commandeered a tow rig at SeaTac’s C Concourse and trundled a mile to the north end of the airfield, where the Horizon Air craft was parked for maintenance. His window of opportunity didn’t open until shortly before 7 p.m. Russell had begun his shift that afternoon as usual, clocking in just after 2:30 p.m. “I lift a lot of bags - soooooo many bags,” he said.
Panoply gowns free#
UNAUTHORIZED DEPARTURE: Russell took a job as a ground-service agent with Horizon Air in 2015, which afforded him free flights home to Alaska. This account pieces together public air-traffic-control recordings disclosures from the FBI testimony before the Washington State Legislature and an unpublished after-incident report commissioned by the Port of Seat tle, obtained by Rolling Stone through a public-records request. The airline and TSA refused interview requests for this story. But there was no commission to produce a public accounting of Russell’s actions. “It’s the first time that we’ve had a commercial aircraft stolen off the ramp of an active airport,” says Steven Armstrong, vice director of operations for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The incident was one of the most serious domestic airline-security breaches since 9/11. The record of what transpired that August evening is extensive, but largely unofficial. This extraordinary faith extends to overworked, underpaid employees at the bottom of the airport pecking order, including ground agents like Russell who engage in monotonous, often back breaking labor, exposed to the elements, jet exhaust, summertime smoke, and the roar of the runway. But a different standard applies to the hundreds of thousands of workers at the nation’s airports, who are vetted upon hiring and then broadly trusted not to pose a danger. The American system of airport security treats every passenger as a potential threat.
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