Sea-Tac: Sky’s the Limit, Tragically So…+ Horizon Air Update.📌

VamoSetbacks: Incidents & Accidents (Premise).

Clouds Over the Horizon.

“Take a pause…refocus…get us back to the Safety First Philosophy…” So said Captain John Hornibrook, Horizon Air’s VP head of flight operations, after a spate of alarming occurrences over Thanksgiving holiday week.

“…Get pilots’ heads in the game before we have an accident.” His message was directed to top managers and pilot leaders, pressing for urgent action on potentially dangerous incidents. Horizon is a feeder carrier between Alaska Airlines and smaller western cities. It flies Bombardier Q400s and Embraer E175 regional jets, and has a comparatively solid safety record.

But recent reports found incidents of its pilots exceeding airspeed limits, particularly with wing flaps deployed, stressing Q400 airframes. Another Horizon flight neared stall conditions, while other pilots misread and flew through serious weather threats.

All this, in the way of Richard Russell’s suicide aircraft theft in 2018☟; landing on a Pullman, WA taxiway in 2017, and a (non-fatal) Sea-Tac crash landing back in 1988.

Jumpy and Jumping Seats.

Still, Hornibrook’s call-out has ruffled some high-flying Horizon feathers. Namely the Airlines Professional Association. Union heads bemoan a “negative attitude and broad-based descriptions of its individual member pilots. The Teamsters local also cites distrust between the carrier’s management and pilots, to the point where the APA accuses Horizon of breaching the anonymity of a presumably non-punitive Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) system by revealing the identifications of, or other information on, directly involved and/or problem-reporting pilots.

Further clouding the Horizon, however, is what has shadowed the carrier since its widespread flight cancellations in 2017: a shortage of those qualified pilots.

Today, Horizon sees over 90 of its experienced pilots jumping to the Alaska Air flagship. So it, like many feeder lines, is said to be recruiting cabin crews with minimal flying experience. Captains having logged an average of 4,000 flight hours are being replaced by young pilots with significantly under 3,000—although Horizon maintains they are twice above the FAA minimum.

In any case, Vamigré will continue looking beyond these numbers, until we can see clean and clear to the Horizon…

Suicide Mission.

☟Perhaps the most revealing photo released of  doomed Sea-Tac ‘jacker’, Richard Russell over this past weekend was of him fully parka hooded in a windy, teeming rain.

Really, what could possess a young married father to commandeer his airline’s 76-seat Bombardier Q400 regional turboprop, and take off, turn untrained stunt pilot with an aerobatic flip and rolls, then nosedive to his demise with two F-15 fighter jets in hot pursuit? All the while, carrying on a rather jokey, apologetic dialogue with air-traffic controllers who were trying desperately to talk this “screw loose, broken guy” and the stolen aircraft down?

“Beebo” Russell, 29, had been employed by Horizon Air, a feeder subsidiary of Alaska Air, for three years, and had clearance to work on its ‘tow team’ in a secure zone of the carrier’s tarmac and taxiways, ostensibly shunting idle aircraft around. Setting aside personal problems and pressures that may have triggered his self-destructive act, which are well beyond our travel sphere, Vamigré focuses for the moment solely on that photograph.

It appears ‘tow team’ cockpit access encompasses but a portion of his duties, which he noted more explicitly in his radio reference to ‘bags, bags, more bags’. These could include loading/loading baggage, ‘tidying up’ airplane cabins, possibly some pre-flight watering and refueling. What Horizon calls ‘ground- service agents’, were once referred to as ramp-rats, and it can be grueling work under the best of weather conditions, particularly during a rush period of arrivals and departures, morning or afternoon.

Towing a plane into/out of assigned gate slots and cockpit jockeying around the tarmac are plum parts of ground service. Duties can also involve pulling, packing or distributing bin loads of luggage and cargo. Not just tidying up, but cleaning full-load aircraft cabins, cockpit to galleys (fore and aft), and every seat row in between. This involves digging trash and left-behinds out of setback pockets, from under/between passenger seats and up in overhead bins (barf bags, dirty diapers, if not far worse).

Then come the galleys crammed with overflowing garbage containers, to scrubbing counters/floors, clearing out and removing/ replacing food/drink modules, often already overripe. Easy pickin’s compared to the lavatories, first-class back to the hell holes of rear cabin heads (no vile details needed here), especially after lengthy international flights.

Exterior tasks involve refilling potable water tanks, reaching hoses up to fuselage connections from atop ground service truck beds. Clean and easy duty relative to toilet detail, attaching grubby hoses from a ‘honey wagon’ vehicle up to lavatory fittings to empty overloaded receptacles of the worst kind, more often as not getting a fateful of the human waste, then refilling their flushing water tanks. This, while other ground crew members are refueling the planes, releasing noxious fumes of jet fuel that inevitably blow face-on.

These ground services become problematic all the more under the press of tight scheduling, when crews scramble from one craft to another, ever aware of how crucial attention to detail (tightening nozzles, fastening doors and latches) is relative to the safe operation of any given flight. Ramp-rats become further swamped in more inclement weather: Be it scorching heatwaves, freezing winter blizzard conditions that demand sticky de-icer spraying of wings and flaps, hosed from the wind-blown elevated baskets of cherry-picker trucks. Or in Russell’s case, drenching rain storms/squalls at any time, which can last for hours or days on end, with gusts to match.

So travel perks notwithstanding, airport ground service can be a taxing, even injurious occupation. Let alone when a glorified ramp-rat such as friendly, family man, Richard Russell is struggling to make ends meet, barely earning minimum wage out there—to the point where he and his flight simulator video game delusions had evidently reached his limit.

Still, no excuse for this dreadfully loopy joyride, just sayin’…

More to come on this all, as the NTSB, FBI and Alaska Airlines officials continue investigating the incident and the apparently suicidal Russell’s personal history…