Baggage Handler Who Stole Seattle Plane May Have Learned How to Fly in Simulator

The one-hour-long ride ended on a nearby island, when Richard Russell crashed the plane into a giant ball of fire. Two F15 fighter jets had been deployed and were making considerable efforts to keep him away from populated areas and the airport.

Russell crashed the Horizon Air turboprop Q400 jet on Ketron Island, which is home to about 20 residents, none of which were around at the time of the explosion. Previously, he’d told traffic controllers that he knew he was looking at life behind bars for his stunt and indicated that he had no intention of letting himself get caught.

Before that, he was doing loops and barrel rolls in the airplane. Investigators have already said that the crash was due to the pilot’s inexperience and the fact that he was doing aerial stunts.

For a baggage handler to be able to do this kind of stunts is baffling, Horizon Air specialists point out, as cited by NZ Herald. Just as baffling is that he knew how to start and pilot the plane in the first place.

One possible theory investigators are considering is that he learned all this using a simulator. Russell himself joked with traffic controllers that he knew how to pilot the plane because he’d played “some video games.”

“He did some aerobatics in the airplane that I was shocked to see. And for him to do that I would think that he either played in a simulator or what. It looked pretty amazing to me. Maybe it was luck, I don't know,” Rick Christenson, a retired operational supervisor for Horizon Air, says.

“We don't know how he learned to do that,” Horizon Air CEO Gary Beck adds. “Commercial aircraft are complex machines. No idea how he achieved that experience.”

During his 4 years with the company, Russell worked as a ground service agent, which means he spent a lot of times around planes – but not inside them. His main responsibilities, as he said in a video on his YouTube channel, consisted of handling luggage. And it was a job he’d grown bored of.

The FBI’s Seattle office has ruled the incident as an accident and not a terrorist attack. Russell was suicidal and depressed, and this could have played a part in his plan to steal the plane for one last joyride.

Here’s a video of the plane doing aerial stunts right before crashing on Ketron Island.