An airport employee stole a plane and flew it for an hour, before crashing
I didn’t mean to do two plane-crash stories in a row, but this one was irresistible—and had a different outcome from the one we talked about in the last episode. A ground employee at the Seattle airport stole an airplane and flew it around for an hour before crashing onto an island. It happened on Friday night.
Hi everyone, it’s Jeff, and welcome to Plain English. This is episode 77. You know the drill by now, the transcript is online at PlainEnglish.com/77, so you can read along as you listen. And you’ll see the translations there from English to Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Italian.
The English phrasal verb today is “take off” so listen for that during the main part of the episode. No time to waste, let’s get started.
Civilian steals a plane, flies for an hour before crashing
An employee at the Seattle airport stole a plane and took it for a suicidal joy-ride.
It’s the kind of thing that should be impossible. A civilian—a non-pilot—a member of the ground crew at the Seattle airport actually stole a plane by himself and flew it around. He did tricks in the air, communicated by radio with air-traffic control, and eventually crashed the plane on a sparsely-populated island. He did not survive the crash.
In this story, I’ll refer to him as the pilot because he was the one flying the plane, but he wasn’t an actual pilot with a license and training and things like that. In fact, according to information we have right now, he hadn’t ever flown a plane before. In his radio conversations with air-traffic control, he said that he knew what he was doing because he had played a lot of video games.
The man was 29 years old; his name was not released. He worked for Horizon Air, a regional airline that operated Alaska Airlines flights. He was on the ground crew at the airport; his job was to direct airplanes toward the gates and the runways, and to assist in de-icing the planes in bad weather.
At around 8:00 pm last Friday, he boarded a 76-seat turboprop plane that was empty of all passengers. There were no other crew members on board. This was very, very much against the rules: all airports have procedures that are supposed to prevent anyone from being on a plane by him- or herself. The plane was parked for maintenance and was not scheduled to fly passengers for the rest of the night.
Just a couple of minutes after the plane took off, the US air force mobilized two F-15 fighter jets from the neighboring state of Oregon. The fighter jets caught up with the stolen plane and pursued it from a distance but they did not shoot the plane down.
It was not clear to spectators or to airport officials whether the pilot was actually doing tricks in the air or was simply flying badly. But spectators from the ground thought they were witnessing someone practice acrobatics for an air show, especially after they saw the military jets pursuing this one plane.
The plane was in the air for about an hour. During the flight, the pilot had extensive conversations with air-traffic control. The air-traffic control agents were trying to convince the pilot to land the plane safely and to stay clear of populated areas. At one point, when the air-traffic controller tried to help him land the plane, the pilot said, “I don’t need that much help. I’ve played some video games before.” He asked air-traffic control to show him where he could see a whale in the ocean that had been making news in the area recently.
He seemed to know that this was big trouble for him. He said over the radio that he knew that he would probably go to jail for life if he survived the accident. The air-traffic controllers tried to get him not to think about that, and to just land the plane. But the pilot responded by saying he didn’t know if he wanted to land the plane. He said, “I was kinda hoping that this was gonna be it.” That probably meant that he took the plane as a suicide mission. At one point, he described himself as “just a broken guy” with “a few screws loose,” meaning that he wasn’t in a good place emotionally. The authorities haven’t released his name, but they called him by his first name on the recordings.
The last radio communication came at 8:47 at night. The plane eventually crashed at 9:30, about 40 miles from the Seattle airport on a small island. Nobody on the ground was hurt. The pilot was killed. Witnesses said they heard a loud explosion and saw a thick column of smoke coming up from the crash site. Much of the flight was caught on video by television news.
I’d like to say “hi” to a couple of listeners today. Ana from Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, Miguel from Puerto Rico, Guilherme from Brazil and finally Fabiana from Brazil, all wrote to say hi last week. Fabiana said her problem used to be listening, but she’s better at listening and now needs to work on speaking. And I will share with you what I suggested. I suggested she pick one or two paragraphs from the program to practice pronunciation. Listen to it the way I pronounce the words, then try reading the paragraph out loud as many times as you need to get comfortable making the sounds and pronouncing the words. And whenever you get stuck, just listen again. You don’t need to do this with more than one or two paragraphs at a time, but you’ll benefit from just practicing making the sounds. And the good news is you have the correct English pronunciation already, so you never need to wonder how a word is supposed to sound. The only exception is when I try to pronounce Portuguese names—I’m positive I don’t say those right, so don’t mimic my pronunciation of Fabiana or Guilherme.
So thanks to everyone who sent me a note this week. JR and I both love hearing from listeners, so feel free to send us emails and introduce yourselves, tell us where you’re from and why you’re learning English. It helps us keep the show relevant each and every week. JR can be reached at [email protected] and I am [email protected].
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