Passengers Report Stolen SeaTac Plane, Grounded Flights

Status
Not open for further replies.
TheGolfPilot said:
I keep hearing from non pilot folks that this is going to mean more TSA and security measures.

Why!?

If there is anything to be done here, it is to require anybody working on a ramp should be required to carry a 3rd class medical certificate or similar. But would a doctor have noticed this guy was THIS unstable? Probably not.

At the very least, lock cockpits when pilot isn’t in it.

Making TSA harder or general aviation travel harder won’t prevent this in the future.
Click to expand...

TSA doesn't just have oversight of passenger screening, but of airport security as a whole. I'm sure they are reviewing this scenario and playing the what if game. What if he took a larger plane like a 737? What if he targeted a populated area? And we all know the government is constantly looking for situations that need their help to justify their existence, especially TSA.

I doubt you will see anything from a passenger perspective, but there may be some changes to employee screening and access controls.
 
TheGolfPilot said:
At the very least, lock cockpits when pilot isn’t in it.
Click to expand...

My company used to do this until about a year ago. Each pilot had a key. I'll bet we go back to it.
 
midwestpa24 said:
...
There will probably be a knee jerk reaction, aided by some congressman that doesn't know the difference between a Q400 and a cruise ship. Probably raise pilot hour requirements to 2500 hours just for kicks.
Click to expand...

Or maybe, Congress will say “hey this idiot with no flight experience was able to take off and do some cool stunts. I guess flying isn’t that hard after all. Let’s lower the requirement from 1500 hours to 100.” There could be an upside. Right?

;)
 
BrianNC said:
From the recording it sounds like he wasn't a pilot.
Click to expand...

I think considering that he successfully took off in the airplane and looped that sum' ***** he is every bit a pilot regardless of how IACO or the FAA defines it.
 
Only way to really fix this is better employee preemployment screening and two deep access. Basically, make it illegal to have solo ground access to any 121 commercial aircraft by non pilot personnel.

The dude had access rights to the aircraft. So by the nature of his job anything you add to the aircraft to lock it out he would have access to.

The whole ban flight sims nonsense is stupid. I've met a lot of ground guys who were aviation geeks that, for various reasons, couldn't be pilots.
 
ARFlyer said:
Only way to really fix this is better employee preemployment screening and two deep access. Basically, make it illegal to have solo ground access to any 121 commercial aircraft by non pilot personnel.
Click to expand...

Sounds like that was already protocol for the company from what I've been reading. However, if this guy has credentials to get past the door/gate, what keeps him from strolling up to an unoccupied plane on the ramp. That's basically what this was. The plane was remote parked in a maintenance area.
 
TheGolfPilot said:
I keep hearing from non pilot folks that this is going to mean more TSA and security measures.

Why!?
Click to expand...

They “know” an event like this will mean they don’t have a choice on whether to continue to fund DHS and TSA and do whatever they say.

TheGolfPilot said:
If there is anything to be done here, it is to require anybody working on a ramp should be required to carry a 3rd class medical certificate or similar. But would a doctor have noticed this guy was THIS unstable? Probably not.
Click to expand...

You’ll lose half the ramp staff due to their prescriptions.

TheGolfPilot said:
At the very least, lock cockpits when pilot isn’t in it.
Click to expand...

And maintenance, and cleaners (well they never get cleaned but anyway...), and FAA check airman who forgot his sunglasses, and...

TheGolfPilot said:
Making TSA harder or general aviation travel harder won’t prevent this in the future.
Click to expand...

It didn’t the first time either. It just moved the hijackings to the employees.

That never stops them.

A 29 year old ramper from Seattle just beat a $7.6 BILLION dollar a year security agency, every airline security chief out there, and every airport management leadership team. (If their airports were susceptible to the same sort of rampie hijacking. And they were.)

You think any of those people can possibly not retaliate, take it all out on the people left alive, and make us all pay for whatever their next great plan is? LOL.

Those people are MAD today.

The fallacy that securing one side of the ramp fire door was enough, has been broken too many times now with too much visibility on this event. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” finally failed in a spectacular way.

It had been failing for decades in less noticeable ways and they didn’t do anything about it. But now it’ll be a full court press to set up the next layer of make believe security.

The assumption that everyone on the ramp side of the fire door in uniforms were benevolent was an error. Always has been.

They’re always just rolling the dice in security anyway. Block the most likely things and more things pop up.

Could have been a suicidal Air Marshal or FFDO.

Think about that one for a minute.

Wouldn’t THAT make some people who think perfect security is ever possible’s heads explode?

LOL. There’s your “good news” for the day. It wasn’t a “trusted” employee.
 
midwestpa24 said:
Sounds like that was already protocol for the company from what I've been reading. However, if this guy has credentials to get past the door/gate, what keeps him from strolling up to an unoccupied plane on the ramp. That's basically what this was. The plane was remote parked in a maintenance area.
Click to expand...

Manned .50 cal on all terminal roofs. Hahaha. See someone alone approaching an aircraft? Shoot to kill. LOL.
 
SkyDog58 said:
Or maybe, Congress will say “hey this idiot with no flight experience was able to take off and do some cool stunts. I guess flying isn’t that hard after all. Let’s lower the requirement from 1500 hours to 100.” There could be an upside. Right?

;)
Click to expand...

That would most certainly not be an upside lol

The artificial scarcity of pilots is a good thing!
 
dottat said:
Anyone else interested in he taxied and departed a runway SeaTac on a Friday night without getting blocked or hitting another plane?

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
The audio transcripts say he came shooting out of the ramp (Cargo 1) at high speed. It's only a few hunderd feet to 16C where he sat for a while with ATC asking who he was.
 
benyflyguy said:
So ATC is trying to talk the guy down. Has that ever worked??
Click to expand...

Not for a suicidal non-pilot flying a plane. They have managed to talk down
- the owner of a King Air whose contract pilot died in the left seat. All his experience was soloing a 172 30 years earlier.
- the wife of a King Air pilot after he became disabled due to medical reasons.

Dunno, maybe it's the KA that is just so easy to fly.
 
TheGolfPilot said:
...At the very least, lock cockpits when pilot isn’t in it.
Click to expand...

I don't think you have any idea how this stuff works. Pretty much every plane out there flying has a stack of deferred logbook write-ups for squawks that get fixed when it's parked and it ain't pilots that fix them and most of them ain't getting fixed if you can't get in the cockpit. The airplane is already in a secure area on the AOA where only authorized people can get to it. Now how you make sure that none of those authorized people ever go nuts is the question. Because apparently, up until yesterday, this guy wasn't nuts and there was probably nothing in a background check that would have given anyone any indication that he was going to go nuts on or about August 10, 2018.
 
weilke said:
Not for a suicidal non-pilot flying a plane. They have managed to talk down
- the owner of a King Air whose contract pilot died in the left seat. All his experience was soloing a 172 30 years earlier.
- the wife of a King Air pilot after he became disabled due to medical reasons.

Dunno, maybe it's the KA that is just so easy to fly.
Click to expand...

It is a pussycat. Oversized 182. Now lose one on departure and yeah that pedestrian is toast. But so are many MEL rated hobbyists too that, good bad or indifferent, don't have the inclination to remain proficient at OEI and statistically speaking would be safer in a gliding single. But we can't say that here, cuz twins are safer and cheese. :rolleyes::D
 
Tantalum said:
I'm wondering what the legal and regulatory outcome of this will be. Mental health has been front and center recently so that will continue to be a focus. was always kind of a surprise to me that cockpit doors weren't kept just locked at all times with a key card access code like the jetways at airports
Click to expand...
At what level of aircraft should impenetrable, or at least locked, doors be required?
 
anyone know if it's confirmed that no one on the ground was hurt or worse?
 
paflyer said:
At what level of aircraft should impenetrable, or at least locked, doors be required?
Click to expand...
no idea, and hopefully this is enough of an aberration that it is just chalked up to a freak occurrence

As others have noted, the guy was not malicious and was not a passenger.. just completely off his rocker that day. So grateful for a multitude of reasons that this was not "terrorism"
 
I think I can draw an analogy to IT security. In the last few years more and more places are requiring more complex passwords- I’m sure you’ve all seen this where it has to be so many characters long, include a lower and uppercase letter, number, and some symbol AND must be changed every x days and they remember your last 5 or whatever so you can’t reuse them.

And this is all for a reason, brute force password attacks work better than ever. You need to up the complexity so the average password can’t be guessed in minutes..... but...

So of course now people are locking themselves out of their own accounts left and right. Everyone is writing those more secure passwords on sticky notes under their keyboards or right on the monitor. They have to because nobody can remember a 10 character string with letters, numbers, and symbols that they have to change every 3 weeks. Tech support is now becoming more used to resetting passwords and therefore more vulnerable to being tricked into resetting one for a hacker... or worse they implement automated easily guessable security questions. A lot of system administrators are just turning off the complexity requirements at the demand of their users.

Besides with physical access and the right bootable CD/thumb drive I don’t need a password I can just copy your files or change your password anyway....

TL;DR:
The point of all that is that whether we’re talking computers or airplanes the things we’re trying to secure exist to be used. People need to be able to access and use them. There comes a point where between resources and the simple ability to conduct daily operations things simply can’t be much more secure than they are. I think we’re very close to that point with commercial aviation.
 
eman1200 said:
anyone know if it's confirmed that no one on the ground was hurt or worse?
Click to expand...

Caught a press briefing earlier. FBI said he crahed in a wooded area of the island and no structures were affected, it was not a populated area. So unlikely that someone on the ground was hit unless some poor soul was in the wrong place at the wrong time in the middle of the woods

They would not even confirm that pilot was the sole body on board until they could thoroughly search and comb through the wreckage
 
Aight if no one else was hurt, I don’t feel too bad saying that he would have been a good candidate for an emotional support squirrel or monkey.
 
eman1200 said:
Aight if no one else was hurt, I don’t feel too bad saying that he would have been a good candidate for an emotional support squirrel or monkey.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but they wouldn’t let them on the flight anymore. :)
 
denverpilot said:
Another few hundred thousand dollar upgrade coming soon to the doors of doom! Woooo hooo. LOL.
Click to expand...
Lol!! The airplane, when parked properly, is already considered secured. A key won’t change that. Rampers will need a key to clean and service the aircraft. You really need to trust someone sometime.
 
Tantalum said:
...however if he turned towards the more populated areas my conjecture is that he gets shot down while still over the water....

[snip]

...B.) you send a very clear "DON'T F WITH THIS" message to anyone else who may potentially have this idea...
Click to expand...
Not much of a deterrent for someone who's suicidal like this guy.
 
slacktide said:
I have not started a Q400, but I have started a 787. It’s amazingly simple, now that FADEC is common.
Click to expand...
Did you figure it out on your own with no guidance or instruction from anyone?
 
Kritchlow said:
Lol!! The airplane, when parked properly, is already considered secured. A key won’t change that. Rampers will need a key to clean and service the aircraft. You really need to trust someone sometime.
Click to expand...

They’re not going to. You know about “no lone zones” in the military. Here they come for the airlines...
 
There has been more than one instance of suicidal pilots that took a load of passengers with them. Why is everybody so concerned with security with this one incident. I’m more worried about the guy up front deciding he’s had enough when I’m sitting in back, not some guy killing only himself.
I actually met the jet blue guy that later lost it and exited the cockpit in flight screaming “we’re all gonna die”. He was a jerk, but I didn’t think he was nuts at the time.
And no, you can’t restrict access to the cockpit from mechanics, we need access to fix the things that pilots constantly break.
Why this guy had a key I have no idea, it’s being reported that he was a bag smasher.
Yes, bag smasher is the correct term for a ground service person.
 
Juliet Hotel said:
Did you figure it out on your own with no guidance or instruction from anyone?
Click to expand...

I was handed the FCOM and told to have at it. Capt. was on the flight deck the whole time.

Guidance and instruction are available on YouTube accessed via your smartphone.
 
Mike Smith said:
And the question of security is already being asked.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/08/11/us/plane-crash-unauthorized-takeoff/index.html
Click to expand...

Instead of worrying about background checks, psych evaluations and personal protocol, why not just consider locks on cabin doors and ignition keys? You know, kind of like every other vehicle on the planet.

If someone left a car in an open parking lot with the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked and a messed up kid got in, went tearing around the town and ended up crashing into a tree after the cops chased him a bit, do think people's first reaction would be- "We really need to think about security and background checks and psych evaluations and new protocols where somebody is always watching somebody else." ? Most would say- "Lock your damn cars people!"
 
denverpilot said:
A 29 year old ramper from Seattle just beat a $7.6 BILLION dollar a year security agency, every airline security chief out there, and every airport management leadership team. (If their airports were susceptible to the same sort of rampie hijacking. And they were.)

You think any of those people can possibly not retaliate, take it all out on the people left alive, and make us all pay for whatever their next great plan is? LOL.

Those people are MAD today.
Click to expand...

Yep. Today there are legions of career bureaucrats completely horrified that their well constructed palace of cards was breached by a low level nobody.

In many late model turboprop and RJ size aircraft with FADEC control, I believe it requires just four or five steps to get the thing running.

Just guessing...

Fuel on, battery, APU start, bleed air set, fuel pumps, engage start sequence. Repeat for engine 2. Advance condition levers, release parking brake and off you go.

There are airliners on every ramp that can be started and flown away by a MFSX geekster. This will of course have to change right now. Congress is going to do one of its occasional stirrings to life, hold some hearings, and enact more ineffective laws. More legislation by knee jerk, just what we need.

Then, once it becomes public knowledge that there are thousands of aircraft sitting on GA ramps, ready to start and fly away once a sixty year old simple five pin cylinder lock is defeated, the reaction from government is going to be even more severe. We will be an easy target, because general aviation is an activity reserved for wealthy people, and the fact there is a small airplane crash almost every day proves how dangerous they are.

When the media starts discussing accidents like the one in 2014 where a low time pilot flew a Phenom into a two story house in Maryland and killed a mother and her two children, the outrage (the most overused word ever) will be white hot.

How are we going to fight this imagery?

A fire created by an explosion of jet fuel overcame Marie Gemmell, 36, her son, Cole, 3, and infant son, Devin, as they huddled in a second-floor bathroom. One child was in Gemmell’s arms, the other tucked between her legs.

It's gonna get ugly, and the splashover is going to go everywhere.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top