Flight of the Sky King: Astonishing story of a US airport employee who’d by no means flown however stole a aircraft for a 75-minute joyride then crashed on a distant island after a near-impossible barrel roll 10ft above a lake

The wind was with Richard Russell as he took off in a stolen plane from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on August 10, 2018.

Air traffic was ‘unusually sparse’ as Horizon Air Q400 taxied directly to the runway, sending Air Traffic Control into panic.

‘That aircraft is taking off rolling,’ an Alaska Airlines pilot interjected over the radio. ‘His wheels are smoking left and right. Just rolling down the runway.’

At 7:33pm, the passenger airline lifted off, soaring high above Washington state as the pilot on the ground urged for military jets to intercept.

Over the next hour and 15 minutes, 28-year-old Richard ‘Beebo’ Russell flew alone over Tacoma, chatting with ATC as F-15 fighters escorted him on a scenic tour of nearby mountains before he completed a barrel roll over the Puget Sound and crashed into a remote island.

Recordings of his interactions with the ground team – telling how he was ‘a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess’ and ‘knew what he was doing a little bit’ from video games – would memorialise Russell as the ‘Sky King’.

Six years on, the tragic story of a Horizon Air ground service agent who, according to the FBI report, ‘intentionally’ brought the plane down on Ketron Island, killing only himself, continues to resonate with global audiences, urging focus on mental health issues.

Richard Russell arrived for his scheduled shift at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport at 2:36pm on August 10, 2018.

It would be another five hours before he seized the opportunity to steal the passenger airliner, a $32.2mn-at-the-time turboprop airliner capable of carrying 76 people.

Russell had no experience flying. A year prior, he’d been caught ‘pointing and flipping switches’ in an empty jet, judged ‘suspicious’ by a SkyWest Airlines pilot. And the FBI later said he had searched instructional videos online.

While flying, and asked if he was comfortable, he insisted ‘Oh hell yeah, it’s a blast man. I’ve played video games before so, uh, I know what I’m doing a little bit’.

The 28-year-old, undeterred by a lack of experience, nonetheless managed to access the tug and remote cargo area with his employee badge, and found the Horizon Air Q400 unguarded, with no lock on the door and an empty cockpit.

Without an accomplice, he hooked the tug onto the front of the plane himself, moved the wheel blocks and boarded the plane. Russell started the engines, got out, reboarded the tug and turned the plane to face the runway.

Returning to the cockpit, Russell found himself unimpeded, the plane hidden between others until the last minute. He started the propellers turning and taxied to the tarmac.

Air Traffic Control picked up on the anomaly and asked Russell to confirm his call sign.

An Alaska Airlines pilot jumped in to warn that the plane was ‘rolling down the runway’.

At 7:33pm, Russell took off in the airliner, heading south for Mount Rainier, a 14,500ft volcano overlooking the Puget Sound, a valley filled with sea water.

ATC audio from the incident cuts in with Russell admitting to taking the plane without permission.

‘Four four nine, are you not supposed to be on that aircraft?’ a voice on the radio asks.

‘Uh yeah. Uh. I did kind of a bad thing, kind of a selfish thing. But it’s all good. I’m gonna go check out Rainier.’

‘So you hijacked the plane is what you’re saying?’

‘Yeah, I’m afraid I did.’ 

‘… start it up, get it to go … a couple of hours, I guess,’ he continued in the broken recording.

‘But I wouldn’t know how to land it. I wasn’t really planning on landing it.’

The log hears ‘Andrew’, at Air Traffic Control, suggest they will find somebody who ‘knows how to fly one of those aircraft’, guiding Russell through the process as he flew south towards Mount Rainier National Park.

‘All righty,’ Russell replies. ‘Yeah, I just kind of want to do a couple manouevres, see what it can do before I put it down.’

The connection cuts again, before he adds: ‘Sorry, my mic came off. I threw up a little bit. Y’know, I … Shoot, man, I’m sorry about this. I hope this doesn’t ruin your day.’

Richard Russell was a ‘quiet guy’ who was ‘well liked by the other workers’, those close to him said later. His family described him as a ‘warm, compassionate man’.

In troubled moments during the flight he stressed that he did not want to hurt anybody, and apologised to all the people who loved him. 

His High School coach Gary Howell described him as an ‘All American kid’ who was ‘super gregarious, funny, a hard worker’. He served as a leader in the local Christian youth ministry and, according to his peers, spent his time ‘helping troubled kids’. 

He and his wife had moved to the area to be close to her family, according to his blog, and he took a job with Horizon with travel benefits that allowed him to make the most of the sprawling Alaskan landscapes to the north.

Russell spent his time in the air on August 10 moving between the mountains and reflecting on the natural beauty of Washington before bringing the plane down.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) lost sight of the airliner as Russell passed by Mount Rainier, some 15 minutes after takeoff.

‘You can see all the terrain around you? You’ve got no issue with visibility or anything?’ the voice on the ground asked.

‘No, everything’s peachy. Peachy clean,’ Russell replied.

‘I just did a little circle around Rainier, it’s beautiful. I think I got some gas to go check out the Olympics, and, uh, yeah …’

Russell passed by Joint Base Lewis-McChord around half an hour later, again travelling in a loop over the outskirts of Tacoma.

By 8:15pm, Portland Air National Guard Base, to the south, had scrambled two F-15 fighter jets loaded with Sidewinder missiles and AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, reaching supersonic speeds on the way to escort Russell.

ATC tried to take control of the situation, urging Russell to try to land at a runway in McChord field, near the Joint Base after he said fuel was burning ‘quite a bit faster than I expected’.

‘Ah man those guys would rough me up if I tried landing that,’ Russell shot back.

‘I think I might mess something up there too. I wouldn’t want to do that. I’ll hopefully… Oh they’ve probably got anti-aircraft!’

‘No they don’t have any of that stuff,’ the other voice laughed. ‘We’re just trying to find a place for you to land safely.’

‘Yeah I’m not quite ready to bring it down just yet, but holy smokes I’ve got to stop looking at the fuel because it’s going down quick,’ Russell said.

Told he was being safely kept away from other planes, he responded: ‘I’m glad you’re not screwing up everyone else’s day on account of me.’

Russell evaded ATC’s pleas for him to move southeast, away from Tacoma city, reflecting that, ‘this is probably like jail time for life, huh? I mean I would hope it is for a guy like me.’

‘Well, Rich we’re not going to worry or think about that, but could you start a left-hand turn please?’

Communications cut out again as ATC brings in a grounds crewman ‘with Horizon, I guess’ to help him fly.

‘Naw, I mean, I don’t need that much help. I played some video games before,’ Russell said. 

The sound cuts out again, before Russell comes back: ‘… uh, minimum wage, we’ll chalk it up to that. Maybe it’ll grease some gears a little bit with the higher-ups, yeah.’

Russell’s job, paying $13.75 an hour, consisted mainly of loading and unloading luggage. 

Videos shared before the heist showed Russell’s apparent boredom with the monotony of the job, though he was grateful for the opportunity to travel.

His sense of humour kicked in as he made the jibe about pay, flying over Tacoma. 

‘Dammit, Andrew, people’s lives are at stake here!’ he joked with ATC.

‘Now, Rich, don’t say stuff like that,’ came the reply.

‘No, I told you, I don’t want to hurt no one,’ Russell choked.  

‘I just want you to whisper sweet nothings into my ear.’

The pair went back and forth as ATC tried to instruct Russell on how to turn autopilot on and ‘not concentrate so much on flying the airplane’.

‘Hey, you think if I land this successfully Alaska would give me a job as a pilot?’ Russell joked.

‘You know, I think they would give you a job doing anything if you can pull this off.’

‘Yeah, right!’

Russell continued his journey across the Puget Sound as ATC suggested he could bring the plane down in the water. Russell asked whether he had been in contact with McChord yet, and then changed the topic when he received the affirmative.

‘Hey, I want the coordinates of that orca, with, uh, you know the mama orca with the baby? I want to go see that guy,’ he said.

An orca, Tahlequah, had recently made regional headlines after her second calf died shortly after birth. The mother carried her body for 17 days in apparent grief.

ATC instead offered other places Russell could land. Soon after, Russell said he would like to go and see the Olympic Mountains, northwest of the city.

‘Hey is that pilot on? I want to know what this weather is going to be like in the Olympics,’ he said.

‘Well, if you can see the Olympics, the weather’s good. I can see the Olympics from my window, and it looks pretty good over there.’

‘All right, because, I didn’t, I hit some, sort of like, turbulence around Rainier, but there was no clouds hardly.

‘Yeah, that’s just the wind, blowing over all the bumpy surfaces there.’

The controller warned Russell that he would lose contact if he got too close to the mountain range, as at Rainier. But as Russell made his approach to the mountain vista, his thoughts became more poignant.

‘I’ve got a lot of people that care about me. And uh, it’s going to disappoint them to hear that I did this. 

‘I would like to apologize to each and every one of them. I’m, just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess. Never really knew it until now. Um, just, you know. …

‘… Man! Have you been to the Olympics? These guys are gorgeous, holy smokes.’

‘Yeah, I have been out there,’ came the reassuring voice of the air traffic controller. ‘It’s always a nice drive.’

Finally, the controller turns back to helping Russell make a safe landing, having travelled around the mountains.

‘All righty,’ Russell concedes. ‘Hey, pilot guy! Can this thing do a, uh, a backflip do you think? … I think I’m going to land it, like in a, a safe, safe kind of manner. 

‘I think I’m going to try do a barrel roll, and if that goes good, I’ll just go nose down and call it a night.’

Checking the fuel, he worried that he didn’t have ‘enough to get by’.

‘I’m just going to do this barrel roll real quick.’

‘Well, no need to do that, if you could just start a turn to the right, and then I’ll tell you when to stop turning…’ ATC replied.

But Russell was adamant.

‘I wouldn’t mind just shooting the s**t with you guys, but, it’s all business, you know.

‘I feel like I need to be, what do you think, like 5,000 feet at least to pull this barrel roll off?’

In the final moments of recorded conversation, the voice on the ground urges Russell ‘[we] don’t want you to get hurt either’ and urges him to bring the plane down once more.

‘You sure would be a hero if you could pull of this landing,’ he assures.

Deeply moving footage of the plane climbing over the sound, still barely lit by the orange glow of the sun setting, shows Russell completing the feat, pulling the plane up and back on itself in a wide loop before swooping down along the surface of the water.

‘TOI1 just completed a barrel roll,’ one of the F-15 pilots reported, still shadowing the airliner.

‘Confirm he did a barrel roll?’ came the reply.

‘Affirm. He cleared the surface of the water by approximately 10 feet.’

Rick Christenson, a retired Horizon employee, told local media he saw the plane make the dive down towards the water.

‘We were all screaming, “Oh my god, oh my god,” and I was yelling, “Pull up, pull up,” he recounted.

In his final transmission, Russell deliberated over whether to land the plane.

‘All right. Naw, dammit, I don’t know, man, I don’t know! I don’t want to. I was kind of hoping that would be it, you know.’

After a pause, he realised that there is an issue with the plane.

‘I feel like one of my engines is going out or something.’

Advised to stay over the water, Russell guided the plane over the Puget Sound before bringing it down on the remote Ketron Island, killing only the pilot.

The FBI later ruled that ‘the final descent to the ground appears to have been intentional’.

The case puzzled investigators, who struggled to find a motive.

‘Interviews with work colleagues, friends, and family—and review of text messages exchanged with Russell during the incident—did not identify any information that would suggest the theft of the aircraft was related to wider criminal activity or terrorist ideology,’ the FBI assessed.

‘Although investigators received information regarding Russell’s background, possible stressors, and personal life, no element provided a clear motivation for Russell’s actions.’

They said a body had been found among the wreckage identified as Russell’s, and the manner of death was ruled as suicide. 

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