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from the tomorrow-might-have-been-a-better-day-dept dept.
He stole a 76-seat Bombardier Q400 from Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Two NORAD F-15s scrambled from Portland. He was in contact with Air Traffic Control, apologized to his family. Said he was unwilling to land at a military base because "they would rough me up". Directed out over the Pacific by the fighters, crashed on an uninhabited island in Puget Sound.
A witness claimed he did a loop-de-loop but I didn't see it in his video.
I am completely convinced that suicidal depression can always be cured.
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.
Media outlets identified him as Richard Russell, a 27-year-old who 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. "Incredible," Horizon Air President and Chief Executive Gary Beck said Saturday.
But investigators are still trying to understand why he decided to take the plane for a what appeared to be joy ride Friday evening from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
The act also reignited discussions about airport and aviation security, with Alaska Airlines Chairman and CEO Brad Tilden repeating several times Saturday that passenger and employee safety was — and is — the company's primary concern.
Also at CNN.
(Score: 5, Informative) by sjames on Sunday August 12 2018, @08:43PM (7 children)
Sometimes under generally bad conditions, a pilot must restart an engine (or all of them) in-flight. It would be bad if that couldn't be done.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 12 2018, @11:55PM (6 children)
Thus, the extended protections such as: IAS and requirement of a coded transmission from ATC. The coded transmission could always conceivably be forged, but a faulty IAS should be a reason to never leave the ground in the first place. If the attacker can gain access to tamper with the IAS provision of the system, they can plant all manner of sabotage far simpler.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday August 13 2018, @12:32AM (5 children)
So you've been surprised by a squall, one of your engines flamed out from aspirating too much rain and hail, the vertical winds are bouncing you around like a cork and you'd be just fine waiting for a permissive signal from ATC before you can attempt a re-start procedure and hopefully have enough power to fly out of your situation? Especially considering you may have less than stellar communications with the ATC due to all the lightning and sheets of rain?
As for IAS, it was working just fine until the pitot tube froze over. That actually happens, in exactly the same conditions that are likely to call for an engine restart.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 13 2018, @01:32AM (4 children)
O.K. - normal usage: ATC locks down once stopped on tarmac with transmission of coded signal, then unlocks with coded signal concurrently with permission to start engines.
While in-flight, you'd have to be experiencing total IAS (and whatever else is in the fail-safe system) failure, plus engine failure, PLUS a successful hack of the engine start lockout system in-air, after the engine failure. Seems like a rare enough circumstance that the hackers would be better off targeting healthcare records for ransom or some similarly soft and lucrative target, instead of waiting for years for the opportunity and placing agents on hundreds, probably thousands, of flights just waiting for that opportunity to kill themselves by sending the cracked code at the inopportune moment.
Again, if they can plant such a device on a plane unattended, they can plant much more effective sabotage as well.
In reality, I see this system being implemented not by ATC from the towers, but by the fleet owners from their corporate offices - same way they send a flight plan, they also send an authorization for engine start. Not saying it's without problems, but losing aircraft to suicidal idiots isn't cheap either, particularly if you're hit with a negligence lawsuit for the people they kill when they fail to thread the needle between the towers of a major urban center.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday August 13 2018, @03:58AM (3 children)
If ATC doesn't have to be on board to transmit the lock signal, neither do the bad guys.
So that just leaves us with an expensive system (once you take exhaustive testing, certification, etc into account) that slightly increases the risk of a terrible accident to prevent something that has happened once in living memory..
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 13 2018, @06:30PM
It's not an idea I'm championing, it's an idea I'm saying somebody else will champion and probably make a passable argument for.
The cost of it is trivial as compared to wet-ware TSA goons, but cost will definitely be a factor in the arguments.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 13 2018, @06:43PM (1 child)
Google will outlive you, these 5 have happened since I was born: https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/airlines/a22713369/richard-russell-ground-crew-steal-planes/ [popularmechanics.com]
more detail on the 2003 727:
https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-727-that-vanished-2371187/ [airspacemag.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:20AM
But note that all but one of those were of military aircraft (which would be exempt anyway), and the one civilian case was an Angola, far from the FAA's influence and likely far away from any equipment that might facilitate such a system.