A man stole an aircraft from SeaTac airport and flew aerobatics before crashing it.
All in all, it is a rather flamboyant suicide:
He had all the proper security credentials. He had been working his shift and was believed to still be in uniform. The baggage handler didn’t seem out of place at all — until he was taxiing down the runway and taking off in a stolen passenger plane.
Richard Russell sparked a combination of amazement and fear as he flew — alone — a 76-seat Horizon Air Q400 plane for more than an hour before it crashed on a wooded area on Ketron Island south of Seattle.
He did a barrel roll. A daring swoop. Officials said they didn’t believe he even had a pilot’s license.
………
Jimmy Thomson, deputy editor of Canadian investigative environmental news outlet the Narwhal, compiled portions of the air traffic recording. In one clip, the man says he wouldn’t know how to land the plane. “I wasn’t really planning on landing it,” he says.
F-15s were scrambled to intercept.
This is profoundly weird.