Congratulations, you did that,” he said. “Now let’s try to land that airplane safely and not hurt anybody on the ground.”
“All right!” Russell responded. His voice became wild as he broke in with a darker transmission: “Aw. Dammit. I don’t want to! I was kind of hoping that was going to be it. You know?”
The TSA flatly refuses to discuss the Horizon Air incident and would not release its own civil investigation into the matter. TSA would not arrange any interviews with Rolling Stone , even to discuss the insider threat generally. Administrator Pekoske did not respond to a direct request to discuss the incident, or his department’s stonewalling of it.
The agency determined Russell had no formal flight training, although he’d searched for instructional videos online and was “familiar with the checklist of actions for starting an airplane
Although Russell’s exploit resembled a hijacking, because of a lack of passengers, it was treated as a theft. The FBI took the lead on the investigation. Federal law enforcement would not release the flight data recorder or the cockpit recordings, although the FBI characterized public recordings, grabbed by amateur aviation enthusiasts, as capturing all “significant” communications.
” Les Abend was a pilot for 34 years with American Airlines. He says Russell was uncannily skilled, suggesting he had likely logged a lot of hours on PC flight-simulator software. “If somebody that had no real concept of how to fly that airplane actually got it started and took off, they would have been in the drink,” Abend says. “But this guy knew what he was doing.” In a press conference on August 11th, airline executives were dumbfounded – and in their shock sounded oddly chuffed about Russell’s aerobatics. Continue lendo