#WILL TINY THIEF COME BACK FULL#
#WILL TINY THIEF COME BACK FREE#

“There didn’t seem to be anything that was out of the ordinary - up until the last minute when he actually took it,” he says. He tells Rolling Stone that Russell’s “brazen” theft of the Q400 was hidden in plain sight on the busy tarmac. Matt Scott was the FBI’s case agent for the investigation. He then hopped out, reboarded the tug, and swiveled the plane toward the taxiway. Although trained to start the aircraft’s auxiliary power unit, Russell exceeded all authorization - toggling levers and switches in sequence to fire up the engines. At 7:15 p.m., he hooked the tug to the front of the Q400, tossed aside the wheel blocks, and boarded the plane. The biggest impediment Russell faced is that maneuvering a parked plane is a two-man job, and he had no accomplice. There was no lock on the door of the airplane. Russell’s employee badge gave him access to both the tug and the remote cargo area.

The plane, with seating for 76, had completed its last scheduled flight for the day around noon, a 23-minute jump from British Columbia’s Vancouver Island to Seattle, across the Salish Sea. Wearing a weathered yellow-and-orange reflective vest, Russell commandeered a tow rig at SeaTac’s C Concourse and trundled a mile to the north end of the airfield, where the Horizon Air craft was parked for maintenance. His window of opportunity didn’t open until shortly before 7 p.m. Russell had begun his shift that afternoon as usual, clocking in just after 2:30 p.m. “I lift a lot of bags - soooooo many bags,” he said.

#WILL TINY THIEF COME BACK FREE#

UNAUTHORIZED DEPARTURE: Russell took a job as a ground-service agent with Horizon Air in 2015, which afforded him free flights home to Alaska. This extraordinary faith extends to overworked, underpaid employees at the bottom of the airport pecking order, including ground agents like Russell who engage in monotonous, often back breaking labor, exposed to the elements, jet exhaust, summertime smoke, and the roar of the runway. But a different standard applies to the hundreds of thousands of workers at the nation’s airports, who are vetted upon hiring and then broadly trusted not to pose a danger. The American system of airport security treats every passenger as a potential threat. Silently, and without warning, he’d gone rogue. His core duties revolved around loading baggage onto short-haul flights, but he was also trained to tow planes on the tarmac.

He was not a pilot he worked ground crew for Horizon Air.

#WILL TINY THIEF COME BACK FULL#

Inside the SeaTac terminals, the indignities of airport security were in full force: Transportation Security Administration agents were X-raying shoes, forcing travelers to toss out tubes of toothpaste, and palpating passengers’ private parts with the backs of blue-gloved hands to guard against box cutters being smuggled in their bras or briefs. It was August 10th, 2018, a warm, clear evening nearly two decades after 9/11.

Will tiny thief come back