On Friday, an airport worker at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport stole a 76-seat commercial airplane owned by Horizon Air of the Alaska Air Group and flew for about an hour before crashing. The ground service agent, Richard Russell, had no pilot’s license and no authority to be at the aircraft’s controls. In the post-Sept. 11 world of airport security, this sort of thing shouldn’t happen. That it did shows that for all of Transportation Security Administration’s showmanship, airports aren’t quite the secure zones that we have been led to believe.
Part of the problem is that the TSA’s mandate to peek into your bags and under your clothes, while giving a good show of creating a secure space, doesn’t mean that there is much oversight or control behind the scenes at the airport. That roughly explains how Russell, whose job was mostly moving luggage, was able to walk onto a plane and into a cockpit without anyone stopping him.
Now the FBI is trying to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent similar incidents in the future. That’s a good start, but it also reeks of the typically reactionary approach to airline security in the United States. In addition to figuring out how to prevent this sort of thing from happening, the government would be well served by examining other potentially exploitable security holes.
One thing that does seem to have gone right, however, is the quick response from both the Air National Guard, which sent planes to fly alongside the stolen aircraft and be on hand should things go wrong, and air traffic control, which calmly attempted to convince Russell to land.
In the end, the plane crash landed on Ketron Island, about 30 miles from the airport, setting off a small forest fire and splintering the aircraft.
Although no one aside from Russell was killed, the seeming ease with which he ended up in the cockpit and took off raises alarming questions about airport security. For all of the body scanners, metal detectors, removing of shoes and belts, liquid restrictions, and other airport hassles, the back end of airports seem surprisingly insecure — and the trade-off of privacy for security seems far less appealing or worthwhile. After all, what’s the point in setting up a checkpoint at the front door if anyone with access to the back can just waltz in, flip some switches, and take to the skies?
