Alaska Airlines Q400 stolen from Sea-Tac

Wow that is crazy. I'm guessing a disgruntled employee (aka low paid regional pilot).

 

http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2018/08/11/jet-crashes-after-unauthorized-take-off-from-seatac-airport-officials-say.html

 

For a guy trained only on a video game, he does a pretty mean barrel roll. When he pulls out of the bottom looks like he's pulling some serious G's.

 

Exactly what I was thinking. Too bad he didn’t land safely, I’m sure he would of been head hunted by a few airlines


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I doubt seriously that an airline would look once at him if he did survive and if they did, it would be to sue hime for stealing a 32 million dollar airplane. Could have used a lot more right rudder in the roll out.

 

Is it possible that he had received some training in the cockpit, and had a license to taxi? The character Joe Patroni in the movie "Airport" was licensed to taxi 707s. Once that far, actually taking off might not have been too much more difficult, especially if he had practiced on a video game.

 

You don’t just get into a q400 and turn the key. You have to start the apu and get bleed air to the engines then add fuel. You would have to be semi knowledgeable on systems to do that. He probably had one of those q400 add ons for flight simulator.

 

When I was stationed at Hondo in 1944 as a crewman we could do everything to operate our airplanes except to fly them and they were a lot more complex than a turbo-prop. He had ample knowledge to do what he did, I think.

 

If he was an engine mechanic, he probably knew all of that. What amazes me is that the tower apparently gave him clearance to taxi and take off. I doubt if he tried to do it without clearance.

 

All the original articles said "unauthorized takeoff" before they knew who was flying it. To me that sounds like the tower didn't give him clearance rather than "unauthorized takeoff" meaning it was considered stolen as soon as it left the ground.

 

I seriously doubt they cleared him. They wouldn’t know who it was with no flight plan filed. And that plane wouldn’t be going VFR.
As soon as he called for taxi they would say, “who are you? I don’t have a flight plan on you.”

 

Some more videos on the incident:

 

All the ground transmissions are in the video. This guy wasn't asking for permission.

 

The only places I know of with active measures to stop aircraft from taxiing and taking off are AF bases with a nuclear mission to prevent unauthorized take-off of nuclear weapon loaded aircraft. USAF is willing to lose an aircraft and ground vehicles to prevent that from happening. Not really practical at civilian airports.

 

It's hard to blame airport security here, since the guy was licensed to be around the aircraft. Presumably he was security screened when he was hired. But if someone is suicidal, especially someone friends and neighbors didn't suspect, all bets are off.