Man Who Stole Plane Near Seattle Raises Troubling Security Question
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This should be a wake-up call to everyone in the country. We can't survive without being able to trust and respect each other as human beings. Part of that is recognizing that even the most humble occupations deserve a fair wage and chance at advancement in life.
If we can't respect the people who put in 8 hour days on our behalf and fulfill our obligations to them as responsible business owners/organizers, we are doomed to see repeats of this type of tragedy.
People seek purpose, and many are content to do even the more "mundane" jobs so long as the compensation is fair. Too many places seek to be successful on Wall Street's terms rather than in providing a service to their community.
I'm sure an MBA will surface and tell me I'm wrong, but I've not encountered a workplace that didn't marginalize their workers and generated a tragedy of the likes that has become a hallmark of the last 50 years.
God Speed, Russell. May your death have not been in vain.
[0]Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion in America, Mark Ames
P.S. It's godspeed, not "God speed".
Maybe spend less time on Reddit, Facebook, etc... Things probably aren't as bad as they look through the lens of social media.
Things are terrible, and putting your head in the sand does nothing but exacerbate the situation.
While I appreciate your view on my perspective, it comes from careful analysis of macroeconomic data, as well as discussing the issues with citizens who would eventually be my constituents when I run in the next election cycle.
There was a man who shot himself on the steps of a government(?) building, which is a town over from where I'm originally from, because he was laid off.
A friend showed me the note he left on Facebook before it got deleted. It was very clear that he had been struggling financially for years and the layoff was the final straw.
In a sense, the way he went out was his attempt to bring attention to the problems he faced and believes others were facing, too. While I'm not an advocate of martyrdom, it's kind of sad that the very act he thought would shine light on his suffering was disappeared from the record.
But yes, sad that it probably didn't get the attention he wanted. Was there no news article explaining his suicide and the causes?
The Arab Spring revolutions were started by a suicide brought about by severe injustice and poverty.
The suicide was the spark, the tinder was almost literally brought about by a lack of water.
Facebook note: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1888367364...
"A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy" : https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/nyregion/livery-driver-ta...
Just look at the situation in NYC with ride-sharing and all the taxi driver suicides.
To clarify this, it is not 'taxi driver' suicides, it is suicides by medallion investors.
Most drivers do not own medallions.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/06/taxi...
For those who defend the system, often enough the medallions are their life saving / insurance when they get old, and almost always financed by loans.
The medallions going worthless at the same time invalidates their retirement plans and STILL leaves them on the hook for the loan.
Would it not be just that, if we're going to rewrite the economic rules in some areas, we give partial compensation towards those we just screwed over?
Presumably we're changing the rules because of progress (e.g. Uber and Lyft showing on-demand rideshare has a market), which is good for everyone.
But say the human lifespan is 85 years +/-. 25 years for education to post-secondary graduation (e.g. bachelor's degree in US). Probably another 2-5 years of accumulating working capital for your venture.
So there's a set number of "shots" a person gets in their life.
In this instance, what's wrong with saying "We're doing away with the medallion system. Existing medallions will be repurchased by the government at a price proportional to ownership time. Funding will be accomplished by a tax on rideshare companies, that decreases yearly, and ends 5 years from now"?
Otherwise, I see the following sequence of events: (1) people get screwed by technological upheaval -> (2) people become resentful against technological progress -> (3) people vote in politicians / laws that retard technological progress, to the detriment of all
Why not also subsidize traders who lose on a stock?
If you want a society where people can't lose then you also get a society where no one wins.
----
Poverty is the Lord's way of anointing the sinners for the righteous to cull.
Ephesians 1:11 “In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.”
The parts of US culture I am familiar with blur the lines between godliness and wealth pretty far. It is a common belief that the poor are being justly punished for their sins, and that only good things happen to good people.
From the Today's English Version,
Paul's Letter to the Ephesians: Chapter 1, verses 1-11
From Paul, who by God's will is an apostle of Christ Jesus-- To God's people in Ephesus, who are faithfulin their life in union with Christ Jesus.
2-) May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace.
3-) Let us give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! For in our union with Christ he has blessed us by giving us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly world.
4-) Even before the world was made, God had chosen us to be his through our union with Christ, so that we would be holy and without fault before him, because of his love.
5-) God had already decided that through Jesus Christ he would make us his children--this was his pleasure and purpose.
6-) Let us praise God for his glorious grace, for the free gift he gave us in his dear Son!
7-) For by the blood of Christ we are set free, that is, our sins are forgiven. How great is the grace of God,
8-) which he gave to us in such large measure! In all his wisdom and insight
9-) God did what he had purposed, and made known to us the secret plan he had already decided to complete by means of Christ.
10-) This plan,which God will complete when the time is right, is to bring all creation together, everything in heaven and on earth, with Christ as head.
11-) All things are done according to God's plan and decision; and God chose us to be his own people in Union with Christ because of his own purpose based on what he had decided from the very beginning.
Nothing in there screams "poverty is an affliction God amounts on the sinner."
You might get a hint of it around verse 14, but that verse is contingent on the Spirit granting complete freedom to the faithful.
The entire section is a call to praise God.
I don't know who this betterofchuck is, but he seems to have a penchant for cherrypicking verse to fit his argument. His interpretation is outright sickening, and bordering on the blasphemous.
Also, America DOES tend to see destitution as a self-inflicted condition, but the main way in which disgust is usually elicited is by the perception of those destitute who refuse to find a way to better themselves. A central American value is to FIGHT for one's own liberty, not to grovel at the feet of others to have it delivered. This disgust can be elicited just as easily by the wealthy as well.
Show me someone who makes an honest effort at lifting themselves up, and I'll show you someone living up to the American ideal.
It isn't pretty, but in my life, THAT is how America has worked.
I'd draw a distinction between those who risk their own capital for themselves, and those who risk capital through others (aka investors). It's not an easy distinction to codify, but it seems important.
Society needs people taking risks for themselves. To benefit themselves. And instead of paying after they've hit rock bottom, maybe it would be smarter to do a bit to keep that from happening.
Because change isn't slowing down...
Earning a livelihood is not gambling. The taxi drivers had entered the market for medallions under specific circumstances and IMHO should be compensated by government if government unilaterally breaks the deal.
A poster above me highlights one example of a livery driver whose income fell precipitously after the ride-sharing floodgates opened.
Even Uber/Lyft drivers themselves are being squeezed (which I guess is the whole point). Look at the conditions that many bay area ride-sharing drivers face... driving hours from their homes outside the bay to make barely above minimum wage (if that) driving 60-80-100 hours a week in the city.
Meanwhile all the marketing from these companies paint a rosy picture of "being your own boss" and earning "side-hustle" money, when in reality most of these drivers are, like taxi drivers, poor immigrants killing themselves trying to make a living (and without all the benefits and protections of a "traditional" job).
Nothing I'm saying is extreme or a stretch. If you live in a major urban area you can literally see it and experience it for yourself. I've made this same point across different threads and keep on getting down-voted, but as Sinclair once said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Literally anyone can snap. The only deterrent is precrime.
It’s like if my doctor asks me why I think my blood pressure is suddenly extreme. It would be the first time I reflected over it.
If a program errors into a non-recoverable state, and I see something in the stack trace, odds are it had something to do with the issue.
He showed intent to send a message. The fact he was about to end his life just amplifies it. Of all the things one could have focused on, that stuck out? Hardly dismissable.
He knew where his life was going either way. Either because he would have ended it regardless, or because he knew that doing anything drastic enough to hurt the "people" who he saw as the source of his hardship would forfeit his ability to live any semblance of a normal life afterward.
Hardly do they ever even discuss that maybe our current labor/employer power balance and paradigm is fundamentally unhealthy, and only exists to fuel the greed of rampant crony capitalism.
That’s a stretch!
The fact is our society has a tendency to be unable to have meaningful discourse until someone provides framework for it. Just as the issue of Slavery back in the 1800's was fraught with the same types of rebellious antics and slaveowner hysterics, we're seeing the same patterns reserve at a time where inequality in the country has begun to reach a new perceived maxima.
You're also seeing the same sort of outpouring of sympathy that many workplace shooters saw after they snapped, even from some people they shot.
I'm not bringing the topic up lightly. I DON'T make a habit of bringing up the obvious or trying to find a way to turn things political. I've seen slices of life recently from the 1%, to teachers, to call center workers, to someone working the floor at a Tractor Supply, to an AM in a grocery store, to farmers, to the retired elderly for who the system worked.
Every last one realizes that something is going amiss right now after a bit of time spent talking. Every last one feels helpless to change anything about it. In this type of environment it is frequently the mentally ill who are best able to perceive the flaws inherent in the System, and the most likely to ACT because of them.
The 'crazies' in short, aren't the problem. The fact we as a society have normalized something so 'off' that even the 'crazies' are starting to get pushed over the edge by it is what we should be paying attention to.
As I said, I was quite confident my post would prove controversial, but I felt it needed to be said, as it has been left unsaid for too long.
I am more surprised this isn’t a everyday thing. This country has a bad mental health issue. But ok. Make sure the lock is on the plane.
What's unsettling is a cheerful disposition mixed with deep resigned sadness. In a weird way its like he had given up and was broken but yet wanted his last shot at some 'fun', and also a bit of a protest while he is at it.
It's feels both disjointed and coherent. He is another voice in a growing realization of the need to organize society around people and not markets.
- A carefully calculated series of beatings?
- The 'naughty step' for at least five minutes?
- Some sort of heavy-duty drug regimen involving intravenous lithium and/or ketamine?
- Maybe just pay someone to follow them around and prod them with a meter-stick whenever they seem to be getting a bit too excited? They could also hold up a warning sign, or maybe a color coded flag (as decided by either local church committee, or an act of parliament, depending on regional preferences) to warn people nearby (when not engaged employing the meter-sick, of course.)[0]
0. This last one is actually really good, as not only does it fix the sociopaths, it gets us closer to full employment, what with the flag people and all the committees, which will need planning meetings with secretaries and facilitators and note-takers and adminstrators, probably some sort of report will need to be generated after a while to see if the committees are working properly, or if we need more. And then there's the craftsmen who make the meter-sticks and flags as well. Probably the flag/meter-stick people will want a uniform, which adds a whole new layer of possibilities.
In fact, I can't see why everyone doesn't just get up NOW and grab a long stick and go out and prod some fucking sociopaths just to show them who's boss. I think that was the idea, anyway.
What evidence do you have that this is a trend?
>I'm sure an MBA will surface and tell me I'm wrong, but I've not encountered a workplace that didn't marginalize their workers and generated a tragedy of the likes that has become a hallmark of the last 50 years.
Isn't that every single employer that hasn't had an employee do this?
What is your response to the European pilot that crashed a passenger plane full of passengers working for an airline in a country that eschews free market capitalism and has strong social safety nets?
Fighter jets were there immediately, people tried to talk him down, and he was lost. Nothing better could have been done all around. Yes, commercial planes could be keycoded or controlled in some other way, but I think most engineers in a controlled setting will agree this creates exponentially more day-to-day headaches than catastrophic situations it prevents.
These planes aren't cheap, even a small personal jet is in the low millions. A Boeing 747 or similar is in the hundreds of millions.
An hard to copy ignition key makes a lot more sense.
One other commenter here mentions a simple ignition key would have prevented this incident, but there's been at least one major ignition system flaw in cars that caused multiple deaths ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch... ), and the consequences of a failure causing loss of control to a passenger aircraft far outweighs that in a car.
Given the very low rate of unauthorised takeoffs of passenger aircraft, and that this case was an insider who may have been able to gain access to keys/codes anyway, is introducing introducing a new system to aircraft justified?
A lot depends on the size, maturity, and customers of the group shipping code. One-person side/hobby projects wouldn't have a 2nd person to review the code. A previous employer initially had a "Deploy to Production" script that ran every 60 seconds, copying the Development folder to the Production folder - to make easier their testing in Prod.
But large publicly-held companies with more customers will often have auditors that require better controls over dev/test/UAT/Prod, and between developers and operators. Separation of Duties is essential to protecting Business Operations from disruptions caused by a single individual.
There should be some sort of lockout that requires 2 humans to put an airplane in the air - at least for major airlines, and could be mandated by law. This could range from a 2-key fuel shutoff for the engines, to different keys on the outer plane door and the inner cockpit door, to mandatory wheel boots on idle airplanes. And part of this would be a very good key management system, possibly with many physical keys managed by an airport or airline "key desk" - or maybe through electronic key-cards, RFID chips or key-fobs, or a smartphone app.
We were responsible for probably 80% of the academic internet. And those Mloc perl5 programs were terrifying to work with.
I guarantee your financial information has passed through that product.
I'm quite surprised that this was overlooked in post-9/11 security reviews.
First, the skill Russell deployed from (only?) having used a PC flight simulator surprised me. If Russell in fact never had any flight experience outside a simulator, well, I'm just stunned at what he was capable of doing. (Linked in article, here for convenience.) [0]
Second, and more importantly, Russell's demise is tragic, pure and simple. He seems relatively smart, had loved ones who cared about him, and was well-liked and well-regarded by his peers and co-workers.
Yet, something was very broken for Russell.
I won't speculate about what may have caused Russell's despair, but I can't help but feel his demise could have been avoided. I wish this story had a different ending.
[0] https://twitter.com/CameronThomsen/status/102815764815856844...
EDIT: readability
Obviously it's not enough to get a pilot license because there are some things that you just can't do in a simulator.
The reason this bugs me is that the 9/11 investigation concluded that multiple people with 0 flight experience can be taught to accurately steer a large commercial jet after just a short time training on small aircraft. In this frame of reference managing to take of in a small turboprop in good weather conditions shouldn't surprise anybody.
P.S. OK, I missed the part where "the plane was doing deep dives, broad loops and at least one upside-down roll"... But the "bug" is still there. If it's generally accepted that you can learn your way in a 747 cockpit on relatively short notice, doing dives and loops with a small plane shouldn't be that unbelievable. And I say this as a person who can comfortably take off and land a Piper Cherokee but was pretty dumbfounded when sitting in the captain's seat of a 747 for the first time.
Getting where you are going safely, without running out of fuel, and landing are the tricky parts.
Taking off and simply flying around are the easy parts. Playing a couple hundred hours of simulators would get you a nice feel for hand flying, especially if you had a PC yoke and rudder pedals. You could download a good plane model and know where absolutely everything is in the cockpit as well.
It's really not that hard. It's just consistency, talking on the radios, and years of experience to know how to handle anything unexpected that makes the pilot. Even then... there's probably a checklist for it.
Whatever the response to this incident is, I hope (and doubt) that it will also balance the CHANCE of this happening against the huge cost and inconvenience of making it "impossible" to ever happen again.
We all know that 100% and "impossible" is not going to work, and we all know that lame "for show" security measures are a huge waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere.
The question that needs to be asked and will not is: what would be the most best positive impact for that same amount of money?
It won't be asked because it's a hard question and people are scared of hard questions.
Better make a Space Corps instead.
However, if the government didn't do "something", it's pretty likely that trust in the US air transportation system would shrink. Wouldn't crush it, but maybe 3 of 100 passengers would forgo air travel because they didn't feel comfortable or that their government isn't on top of it. And maybe that 3% decrease corresponds in $XXX Million in lost revenue for airlines.
So I'd believe that "for show" security measures don't actually increase security, but I'd also bet that they increase airline ridership. The moral of the story is that it's an economic response, not a security one.
Wasting money and theater is a tax on the 97% who still would have flown.
> The inconvenience of extra passenger screening and added costs at airports after 9/11 cause many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination instead, and, since airline travel is far safer than car travel, this has led to an increase of 500 U.S. traffic fatalities per year. Using DHS-mandated value of statistical life at $6.5 million, this equates to a loss of $3.2 billion per year, or $32 billion over the period 2002 to 2011 (Blalock et al. 2007).
The average lifespan is 79. 700M passengers * 1hr / 79yrs --> every year, over 1000 babies are killed by the TSA.
We handle it bad because the news scaremongers with hyperbolic exaggerations. The people get overly anxious and of course politicians rush to the worst possible "solutions".
I remember a while back there was hysteria over pilots not being screened. Then people found out that a pilot doesn't need weapons to take down a plane and screening pilots doesn't make sense. Common sense.
If everyone would just calm down and think things through, we'd come to more sensible solutions. And much of the time, the sensible solution is to do nothing. Bad things happen. Just the way life is. So we should weigh the options calmly and sensibly, not hysterically.
[0] https://flyuk.aero/assets/downloads/resources/checklists/UKV...
Wait... isn't that what you'd be reading right there? Or is the documentation and checklist not the same thing?
So I guess the short answer to your question is yes, in this context the documentation and checklist are not the same thing.
Want to steal an Airbus A320? Here’s the complete startup procedure:
It last happened 7 years ago. From the article:
> Colton Harris-Moore, nicknamed the Barefoot Bandit, was sentenced in 2011 for stealing small planes, which he had learned to fly himself as a teenager after reading flight manuals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris_Moore
He is a Trump supporter BTW.
...and without costing tax payers (F-15 fighter jets scrambling) and private companies (the airlines that owned the crashed plane) millions of dollars, causing stress and anxiety to people boarding other flights at Seattle airport and the subsequent delays to everyone else.
Your mental health experiences aren't the mental health experiences of everyone else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705
Can we please stop insinuating that people who attend church are perfect and incapable of doing wrong and, by omission, insinuating that those of us who do not are evil?
Edit: If the downvoters would like to explain how I’m wrong, that would be lovely.
So glad they told us this important fact. I wonder if his final direct deposit (to his estate) will include that days' pay or if it will count as a vacation day?
Has the news always been this inane?
No lives were lost (apart from the thief's) but the company is out a plane and the taxpayers are out some fuel. I know embezzlers are often required to make restitution, but I've always assumed that this was for rehabilitative purposes. Presumably companies have insurance (maybe embezzlement restitution goes to the insurance company?) and the taxpayer, well, that's what we're paying for.
A second interesting question is the innocent family members who presumably have depended on the income from the thief. Clearly the last (partial?) paycheck won't be material either way, but who would be "punished" and whom "provided restitution" in this case?
That's what I meant by the inanity: it's just a random trivial fact jammed in there without context nor explanation of why it should be relevant. Writing a story is selecting the relevant facts and dropping the rest: if there was a bank robbery I wouldn't expect to see "the robber wore a blue baseball hat" unless it were explained why it was worth mentioning.
It could of course be poor editing, but it reminds me more of one of those high school essays where you just jam a few extra things in there to get the word count up. Admittedly, this isn't the most important article in the world and could easily have been assigned to a junior reporter -- and reporters write a lot so I don't mean to harsh on this one.
(I'm not sure the bank robber in a blue baseball hat is a good example of an unnecessary detail, by the way. Almost every story about a robbery with witnesses is likely to include basic details about what the witnesses saw. I'm not sure I've read a single story about such a robbery that wouldn't include a detail like that!)
Tragic incident, but well handled by NORAD.
Seattle also has JBLM (joint base Lewis/McChord, army and air Force), along with Bremerton naval base. I'm guessing they picked pdx because of pilot availability, travel time is near nothing compared to getting a plane in the air at those distances.
This could have been much worse. I feel bad for the guy, he needed help, but I'm glad it ended how it did. Crashing into another plane, or anywhere populated, would have been catastrophic.
Wonder why Air National Guard's scrambled F-15s [0] didn't engage and bring the plane down before the individual commandeering the prop -- Mr. Russell -- brought the aircraft down with himself in the Ketron Island.
IIRC, the plane flew over several densely populated areas before going down, and I can imagine a thousand horrifically different ways this could have turned out.
[0] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/08/11/f-15s-scrambl...
As far as shooting down the plane, I have no idea how possible that would have been without risking greater collateral damage. Perhaps it could have been done over the sound. But this incident comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Palmdale
http://garchives1.broadcastify.com/15227/20180810/2018081022...
I actually found the ATC recording to be quite moving and very sad. It's frustrating to read comments here assuming he was not shot down because everyone involved was just gullible.
People entrusted to make good decisions did just that.
If you've seen the videos of the F-15s, you know that the stolen plane was definitely within engagement range [0]. It's pretty clear to me that the decision not to shoot down the plane was very intentional.
I agree that a rogue plane over a densely populated area is a nightmare scenario, but also consider that debris from a shot down plane and/or an air-to-air missile over a populated area could be quite bad or worse. Couple this with the fact that the hijacker was communicating with ATC and showed no hostile intent, and it makes sense that the plane was not shot down.
If I was in charge of this operation, I would have given the instruction not to shoot down the plane unless it started to make moves towards a populated area.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=HJld_TYTcAE
Which one of these areas would’ve been the best to shoot him down over?
I thought the fighter jets were to make sure he didn’t head into downtown Seattle?
Like what? It's a small prop plane with a tiny amount of fuel and mass. Stealing a truck is considerably easier and can be used to do considerably more damage.
This 'hurr so scary we need to act' line of reasoning is why people have traded all their freedoms away in exchange for illusionary protection. The attack surface from a malicious actor is near infinite. Worry about the fact that your country's healthcare system kills hundreds of thousands of people every year by denying treatment, not about what a guy in a light aircraft could have done.
KE = m * v
11,000 gallons of gas in a tanker truck = 33 kwh * 11,000 gallons = 1,306,800,000,000 joules
FWIW, I'd be up for reviewing the systems, but let's not over react.
P.S. Feel free to correct my math if I was off the mark.
That's with a high performance truck. A more average truck, or a truck with its speed limited by a governor (common in many commercial fleets) would have about 10% of the kinetic energy of the plane.
And remember, this is assuming the truck can get to its target at top speed. In reality a lot of targets are not reachable by a path that would allow a truck at speed. If the truck can only get to 50 mph (80 kph), it would only deliver about 6% of the plane's kinetic energy.
The plane has a much much larger set of targets that it can deliver full kinetic energy to.
The above is assuming the pilot decides to fly into the target on a fairly level flight path and obeying the manufacturer's safety limits. If the pilot is willing to fly unsafely before the crash, he could probably got 2x to 4x the kinetic energy.
In short, a stolen fully loaded truck is a much smaller threat than a stolen empty Q400, unless what the truck is loaded with is also a threat.
Killing an American citizen who is not presenting an immediate threat still needs a higher bar than "It's easier."
Thankfully, the military pilots stayed cool in a situation like this and waited until they received orders to fire.
One of the lead characters lands into serious, serious trouble when a drunk, fleeing suspect dies in a car crash.
Makes me really sad about the 'shoot first' culture around here ..
Both TFA and your link indicate that ATC had him flying over Puget Sound, the Olympics, and other sparsely-populated areas, and had vectored all other traffic away from him. It's likely that when he flew over densely populated areas it was before the F-15s were scrambled. Watching and seeing how the situation plays out is probably their safest option in this case.
The full ~1hr of ATC audio supports this.
Interestingly enough though, a lot of people aren't too mad at what he did. Quite a few people have paid their respects to this guy. He took the plane, saw some great views and did a barrel roll, then told the fighter pilot guys he was going to bring it down himself. I do like that most sources aren't trying to paint this guy as the devil. Sure what he did was wrong, but he sure did go out in style. Who else can ever say they did a freaking barrel roll in a commercial airliner.
The way the news outlets handled this was sickening. They all hopped on the opportunity to make a headline that they knew damn well would lead people to believe a fully loaded plane was hijacked mid flight.
Now the implications that a ground crew person was able to board a plan unnoticed, and take off is insane. This brings up the whole perspective of sleeper agents and inside jobs. Most data breaches are from insider threats, who's to say the next big thing isn't mass deaths resulting from insider threats.
Nice to see this was down voted?
And even then I imagine the raining shrapnel (likely burning too) would cause plenty of chaos itself.
The outcome of this was probably near the best (the best being the guy managing to land the plane safely and survive) --- it could've been much much worse.
Tex Johnston for one:
Sadly no pictures or videos of exists.
Lots of military bases and critical infra up in the PNW, thankfully it didn't appear to be the case in this incident.