![]() ![]() I don’t know what the burnage is like on takeoff, but it burned quite a bit faster than I expected.” Russell seemed more concerned that his fuel was running low. The job doesn’t require flying skills, yet the hijacker had in some way acquired a significant level of competence in handling a sophisticated airplane - certainly confident enough to have selected a target building and flown into it. Ground handlers direct the handling and loading of airplanes at the gate. Luckily this was not a terrorist, but 29-year-old man Richard Russell, who worked as a ground handler for Horizon Air, the commuter arm of Alaska Airlines. ![]() The Q400 turboprop is less than half the size of the jets used on 9/11 against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, but, loaded with fuel, it was still capable of being a flying bomb that could have taken out any of the skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. How long did it take the air traffic controllers in the tower at Seattle to realize that a rogue airplane was joining regular airline traffic? Could anything have been done to block the airplane before it took off?Īt that point, nobody knew if this was a terrorist action. Never has an otherwise empty commercial airplane parked in a maintenance area, been taken over, its two engines started, taxied out to a runway as though for a scheduled flight and took off apparently under full control. There has never been an airplane hijacking like the one executed as dusk approached at Seattle on Friday. ![]()
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