How to Steal An Airliner

The theft and subsequent crash of a Horizon Air Q400 airliner over the weekend has left many people wondering how it would be possible to steal an airliner from one of the nation’s largest airports in the post-9/11 world. The surprising answer is that is probably easier than you think.

What made Richard Russell’s theft easy to carry out on an apparent whim was that Russell was an airline employee. Russell had worked as a ground service crewman for Horizon for 3-1/2 years prior to Friday’s incident. To be employed in secure areas of the airport, he would have had to pass a five-year background check that included a review of his criminal history as well as prior work history. While aviation background checks don’t delve into an applicant’s mental state, if any psychological problems were apparent they probably would have been noticed during training if they had not been uncovered when Horizon contacted Russell’s previous employers. Russell’s psychological problems probably manifested after he was already on the job and cleared for access to the flight line.

Once he became a Horizon employee, Russell would have been issued a badge that would allow him to access secure areas of the Seattle-Tacoma airport where he worked. Since Russell was an employee who had a legitimate reason to have access to the areas of the airport where the airplanes were parked, getting to the airplane would have been the easy part.

The tricky part would have been starting the engines and taking off, but even that is not as hard as it sounds. The Bombardier Q400 is a turboprop airliner. Jet airliners typically nose into the gate and passengers embark via the retractable jetway. Since turboprop airliners have propellers, they don’t use jetways. Normally turboprops park away from the terminal and passengers walk outside across the open ramp to get onboard. In the case of Russell’s airplane, N449QX was parked in a maintenance area, not at the passenger terminal. Russell used a tug, which he was trained to use as part of his normal duties, to turn the airplane 180 degrees before he took it.

Airliners don’t typically have lockable exterior doors so getting into the plane was also easy. From his job, Russell undoubtedly knew how to open and close the door. After September 11, airliners were required to have lockable cockpit doors, but they are normally only locked during flight.

Airliners also don’t have keyed ignitions as cars do. Much has been made of the intricate sequence of setting cockpit controls to start the engines. This also is not as hard as it sounds. The Bombardier Q400 is a new version of the Dash 8, originally built by de Havilland Canada in the 1980s. The Q400 version first flew in 2000 and has modern avionics and engine controls, which are much simpler than in older airplanes.

The Q400 engines include FADEC, full authority digital electronic engine controls, that greatly simplify managing the engines. While I don’t have any firsthand experience with the Q400, I have flown a variety of turbine airplanes both with and without FADECs. A Beechcraft King Air turboprop without a FADEC has three sets of levers for its two engines: The throttles, the prop controls and the fuel levers. Online pictures of Q400 cockpits show only two levers, the throttles. Starting the engines was probably just a matter of turning on the aircraft batteries and pressing the starter button.

Airplane cockpits are checklist-driven environments. Russell could have found a checklist in the airplane and simply followed the steps to help start the engines and set up the airplane for flight. While this would have required some minimal knowledge, such as knowing where controls are and what they are called, it would not have been an insurmountable obstacle for someone who was around the airplanes on a daily basis. The landing gear control is typically one of the easiest things to find in a cockpit. It is normally a big handle that is shaped like a wheel.

Russell’s website also indicates that he took airline trips in his spare time. A fringe benefit for airline employees is the ability to travel on standby tickets at little or no cost. Russell may have been able to observe pilots on some of these trips, perhaps from the jump seat (a third seat in the cockpit behind the pilots).

Once the engines were started, taxiing and taking off would have been relatively easy. You just push the throttles forward, wait for the airplane to accelerate and pull back on the control yoke to raise the nose. Russell’s flying probably wasn’t smooth and professional, but it didn’t have to be. He just had to get the airplane off the ground and high enough to avoid obstacles.

Russell could have been aided by flight simulator software. Microsoft Flight Simulator is a PC-based game that has undergone many revisions since the 1980s. Current versions allow upgrades so that users can pretend to fly many different aircraft, including the Q400.

As a former simulator instructor, I can say that even nonpilots can fly a simulator with a little coaching. It isn’t uncommon for a novice to be able to do loops and rolls in a simulator. Russell reportedly executed aerobatic maneuvers like these with the Q400 and may well have learned them on a PC-based flight simulator. The Q400 is not built to fly aerobatics, however, and there is good chance that Russell could have killed himself earlier in attempting these maneuvers. The flight instrument displays on five screens in the Q400 cockpit really do look like a video game.

Landing is much more difficult than taking off. Landing an airplane is a combination of art and science. The plane’s autopilot could have helped Russell land the plane, but the final seconds of the flight, the landing flare, touchdown and rollout on the runway would have been in his hands. Large jets have autoland, but a regional airline turboprop would not be equipped with such a system.

It seems likely that Richard Russell was intent on ending his life when he took off. There have been several cases of pilots using their airplanes to commit suicide. It seems likely that this was Russell’s goal all along.

Despite all the precautions and security measures, it is impossible to foresee every scenario. If an airline employee passes a background check and gains trust through years of experience on the job, there is no reason to suspect that he would decide to take an airliner for a fatal joyride. Thankfully, most aviation employees are responsible people for whom bending an airplane and using it to hurt people is unthinkable.

Originally published on The Resurgent

More 9/11 myths

In memory of the victims of the 9/11 attacks and the casualties in the war against the terrorists since then, the Atlanta Conservative Examiner is addressing some of the conspiracies surrounding 9/11 in the hope that sanity will prevail and that Americans can once against unite against a very real and common enemy instead of wasting time and resources chasing phantoms. Six Georgians died in the attacks, eight Georgians died in Afghanistan and 124 Georgians were killed in Iraq. Let us honor their memory and the sacrifice of the thousands of other Americans and Georgians who served or were wounded in action by fighting the real enemy: Al Qaeda and radical Islam.

After the recent Atlanta Conservative Examiner article, “the truth about the September 11 attacks,” there was a lot of feedback, both from conspiracy believers and skeptics. Conspiracy believers pointed out several conspiracies that were not addressed in the article. Some of these other theories and claims will be addressed here.

A potentially explosive claim made by one conspiracy site is that the cockpit door on American 77, the flight that hit the Pentagon, was monitored on the flight data recorder and that this data showed the door was never opened. The site claims that the FDR data was obtained from the NTSB under the Freedom of Information Act and that the cockpit door parameter shows that the door did not open in flight. The site claims that this information was discovered eight years after the fact by an Australian researcher.

This claim cannot be closely examined because the link on the site’s page that purports to allow a download of the FDR data is a dead link. As a professional pilot, I can say that it is unlikely that the cockpit door was monitored on the FDR. Prior to 9/11, cockpit doors were not hardened as they are today and it is unlikely that they were monitored.

An acquaintance who worked in the training department at Delta Air Lines before and after 9/11 agrees that cockpit doors were probably not monitored. He suspects that the monitoring parameter on the FDR, if it actually existed at all, may have represented an electric mechanism that allowed the pilots to unlock the cockpit door without getting out of their seats. This mechanism could be monitored, but the door could also be opened manually.

He also notes that the sound of the door opening might have been picked up on the cockpit voice recorder. Unfortunately, CVRs only record for about 30 minutes. Additionally, according to the NTSB report, the CVR was extensively damaged and the magnetic tape inside was “fused into a solid block of charred plastic.” A photo of the CVR shows the damage from the crash.

Another claim is that Marvin Bush, brother to President Bush, was in charge of security at the World Trade Center on 9/11. This claim is easily disproved. The real head of security for the WTC was John O’Neill, a retired FBI agent. O’Neill was killed in the attacks. Ultimately, the WTC was owned by the Port Authority of N.Y. and N.J. so the Port Authority Police were responsible for security.

911myths.com goes further to debunk the Marvin Bush claim. Bush’s company, Securacom (later called Stratesec), did have a contract to help

install security systems in the WTC after the 1993 bombing. This contract ended in 1998 according the company’s SEC filings. Bush left the company in 2000, and despite claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that Wirt Walker, the firm’s current head, is a Bush relative. Even if Bush’s company had been actively working at the WTC on 9/11, it would be irrelevant since the towers were attacked from the outside by airliners. Additionally, the mere presence of a Bush family member is not evidence of any crime or conspiracy.

The conpiricists charge that the WTC must have been destroyed by explosive charges, claiming that it was the first time in history that a steel building collapsed from a fire. In particular, they point to Building 7, which was not struck by an airliner, and the fact that the buildings seemed to fall straight down, rather than to the side. In reality, no steel skyscraper had ever been hit by an airliner before. No steel-framed buildings had ever been left to burn for six hours without firefighting.

Charles Zimmerman, a Ga. Tech educated Structural Engineer, explains what happened: “Under normal temperatures, the bolted connections of the beams to girders or columns are simple shear connections and do not induce any significant tension in the bolts. However, under much higher sustained temperatures, the steel beams begin to sag like a cable, which introduces tension forces into the bolts in addition to the shear forces for which they were designed, causing brittle failures of the connections. If it is a girder connection to a column, it may cause an entire bay of floor beams to collapse onto the next lower level. The impact load of a floor collapsing onto the floor below is a dynamic load and is a much greater force than just its weight, because it is a moving load. This creates a collapse mechanism called "pancaking" which can continue all the way down the building with one floor collapsing onto the floor below, causing it to collapse, and so forth. While the loss of floors at some levels of a building reduces loads on the columns that once supported them, it also increases their unbraced lengths, which weakens their strength and their ability to support the floors above the removed floors. So the columns begin to fail at the levels [where] floors are lost and the entire building above begins to collapse.”

Zimmerman continues: “Where the fire was located on WTC 7, there were a number of collection girders and trusses to allow more open spaces uninterrupted by columns at lower levels, such that the failure of one of these collection elements due to the heat of the fire made it more vulnerable to progressive collapse. The Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was likewise vulnerable to progressive collapse for this reason, but from blast rather than fire loads.”

With respect to the failure of the Air Force to intercept the airliners, Col. Marc Sasseville, one of the first fighter pilots launched on 9/11, recently told his story in the Wall Street Journal. Sasseville was given the authority to shoot down threatening aircraft. The problem was that his aircraft, launched on short notice, had no missiles and carried only training ammunition. Sasseville decided that if he had to, he would try to disable a hijacked aircraft by crashing his fighter into it.

Additionally, there was not enough time to perform an intercept in most cases. According to the 9/11 Commission report (pp.32-33), in the case of American Flight 11, the first place to be hijacked and the first to crash into the WTC, there were only 27 minutes between the notification of the hijacking and the crash. United Flight 75, the second plane to hit the WTC, crashed 11 minutes after the hijacking was discovered. American Flight 77 went the longest between discovery of the hijacking and crashing at 32 minutes, but NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector) was only notified by the FAA three minutes prior to the crash at the Pentagon. United Flight 93 was discovered to have been hijacked 29 minutes before it crashed. NEADS was not notified by the FAA until after the crash. On all except UAL 175, the transponders were turned off by the hijackers, making it more difficult to track the planes. On UAL 175, the hijackers evidently tried to turn off the transponder, but only succeeded in changing it to a different code.

Another claim made on some sites is that the phone calls from the hijacked aircraft could not have happened because that technology had not been invented on 9/11. The reality is that phones were installed on airliners as early as the 1980s. As the planes flew lower to approach their targets, even personal cell phones may been able to make calls.

There are further holes in the 9/11 conspiracies as well. Apparently no one has developed a rational motive for anyone except al Qaeda to have carried out the attacks. If it was as an excuse to attack Iraq, then why blame Osama bin Laden, attack Afghanistan, and then wait 18 months to invade Iraq? Claims that it was to provide a rationale for cracking down on civil liberties or installing a U.S. dictatorship have been proven false by events. Likewise, no New World Order has arisen from the ashes of the WTC. Theories about Israel’s involvement seem similarly fanciful.

Osama bin Laden admitted to the attacks in a video message in 2004. Al Qaeda had a history of attacking American targets that included the 1993 WTC bombing, bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. In a prelude to the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda agents assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, on September 9, 2001. This was meant to enable the Taliban to crush the Northern Alliance and prevent U.S. aid against the Afghan overlords. Conpiricists typically ignore these facts or else claim that they are hoaxes, as they do to anything that does not fit their narrow worldview.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in the reasoning of the conpiricists is the existence of the conspiracies themselves. Would a government or entity that would sacrifice 3,000 people allow its actions to be made public? It seems more likely that such an organization would squelch the publication of books and movies that exposed their nefarious deeds and make the authors quietly disappear. Perhaps Alex Jones and his fellow conspiracy mongers should watch out.

Read the rest of this article on Examiner.com:

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/more-9-11-myths-cockpit-doors-marvin-bush-and-building-7