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.