Former NTSB chair: Sea-Tac theft requires safeguards and mental health awareness

The former chair of National Transportation Safety Board was just as stunned as the public when he heard about the recent Horizon Q400 theft and crash. What makes prevention difficult, however, is the level of trust Richard Russell has earned over the years, and the rarity of this type of theft.

“I can’t think of one example for a commercial airliner,” Mark Rosenker to Seattle Morning News. “I’ve heard of people stealing general aviation airplanes and military aircraft. But I have not heard of a ground crew individual being successfully able to take an airplane and fly it around for an hour.”

RELATED: Experts: How, why ‘Beebo’ Russell was able to easily take a plane from Sea-Tac

What’s striking in this case is that Richard Russell was able to taxi the airplane onto the tarmac, and then takeoff without a single stopgap to prevent him from getting off the ground.

“That’s the extraordinary part about it,” Rosenker said. “Clearly the FBI are going to be looking at everything to understand exactly how this happened. You can’t stop operations and have everybody walking around with two or three people surveilling them all the time. You’ll never get any work done.”

“So it may well be a technological solution to be able to prevent airplanes from being started without two people. We may end up having to put boots on the landing gears so unauthorized people can’t move them.”

Keeping an eye on mental health in workers and pilots

Beyond security checks, though, it’s become equally important to keep an eye on the mental health of workers and pilots. As an employee for three and half years, Russell built up a level of trust that made an act like this seem unimaginable.

“We’ve seen issues with the pilot community, and they’ve done a good job of attempting to see when there appears to be behavior issues,” Rosenker said. “We saw it on a Jet Blue airplane where several years ago a pilot captain was coaxed off the flight deck when the first officer recognized that he was having a nervous breakdown.”

With the security access engendered by a years of trust and no overt signs of mental stress, preventing this type of theft is a difficult task, especially when the employee is guided by a suicidal nature. But rare as it is, Alaska Airlines is nonetheless going ahead with protocol changes to ensure it never happens again.

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