The Lessons of the Seattle Plane Crash

[Snellius]

Modern life is full of potentially terrifying “what if?” possibilities. What if a pharmacist decided to substitute morphine pills or strychnine for the next prescription you pick up? What if a school-bus driver decided to swing the wheel, and plow a full load of children head-on into incoming traffic, or off an overpass?

What if a FedEx or UPS courier decided to deliver a box full of explosives, or anthrax spores, to an office building, rather than business supplies? What if a disturbed student, teacher, or parent walked into a public school and opened fire on everyone in sight?

The last possibility is a reminder that there are risks some societies will define as acceptable. All the rest illustrate the reality that our lives hang by threads that someone else could decide to cut. The ability to inflict harm, whether intentionally or accidentally, rises more or less in pace with the technological complexity and interdependence of modern life.

Every modern city dweller depends for daily well-being and even survival on systems that make up the hard and soft infrastructure of society—water, power, sanitation, public health, and on down the list of services no one notices until something goes wrong. Most are run by people we don’t know, whose competence and good intentions we have no choice but to take for granted. As for people determined to do harm—the pharmacist who wants to poison customers, the bus driver intent on suicide—the only absolute protection would be surveillance and regimentation on a draconian scale. (Want to avoid the risk that any bus driver, ever, could do something rash? Send them all through full FBI criminal-background checks, plus psychological testing, and then staff every bus with both a driver and a co-driver, each to keep an eye on the other. Any school system could do this. None that I’m aware of does, since it would price bus service out of the realm of practicality.)



https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2018/08/the-lessons-of-the-seattle-plane-crash/567359/

[lapfog_1]

1. airplanes... especially commercial aircraft

should not be that easy to start... some sort of security system should be in place so that only pilots and some specific ground crew (who need to move planes to/from maintenance facilities) should be able to start them...

something bio-metric... fingerprint scanner, retina scanner... something.

[pangaia]

4. How many times have you heard of this happening ?

There is probably a better chance of being it by lightening..


Somehow I don't think this is a big problem... in the grand scheme of things...

[Eugene]

5. Unfortunately, he was that specific kind of ground crew with full clearance.

He was fully trustworthy until he wasn't.

I too would have expected a deterrent system on a $32M aircraft, but someone has stolen airliners only twice before.

[lapfog_1]

8. my understanding is that he had never moved a plane before he stole this one.

there are many people in the ground crew who service the aircraft, very few are allowed to climb into the cockpit and move one... even just to taxi it from gate to maintenance shed.

but maybe that report was wrong... at any event, a fingerprint scanner isn't like $1000s of dollars... my laptop has one.

it wouldn't be that hard to link one into the avionics system... if you went the extra mile, you could prevent the plane from even taking off (flaps extended, engines to full thrust) without an actual pilot at the controls.

I understand this doesn't happen much... nuclear blasts above ground don't happen much either, yet we spend billions on their detection and used to spend billions on fallout shelters, etc.

Before 9/11 how many times before that did hijackers take over a plane and fly it into a building... I think only once with the eiffel tower incident...

Post 9/11 I would think that stealing commercial aircraft... even by members of the ground crew... would have been something that somebody thought of inside "homeland security".

maybe they will start thinking about it now. After all, I always get "randomly selected" every time I take a flight... probably because of me posting things here (it wouldn't be that hard to figure out who I am). IDK... maybe some other reason. But I'm a ZERO risk to the public. Whatever.

[SWBTATTReg]

2. So society obviously accepts the possible damages from hackers and ...

software infiltrators who actually work in these fields in our digital interfaces such as facebook and the like? It's funny because oftentimes when they get caught, they're awarded w/ positions in cyber security and the like.

Unfortunately, a lot of problems caused by hacking and the like has been caused by poorly designed databases and/or online interfaces to those very same data bases. Better security measures, testing, and data base development from the get go probably could have gone quite a way in preventing the widespread hacking that goes on.

Instead, the rabid scramble to get a presence on the internet w/ some sort of online interaction without carefully considering database security prior to that interaction caused a lot of the problems being experienced on the internet. The rewards of hacking were (and still probably is) better than the risks associated w/ hacking and the like, but to be fair, the rewards are getting harder and harder to justify, vs. the risks.

[3Hotdogs]

3. Yeah, but we already gotta take off our shoes. Isn't that enough?

[Aristus]

6. The plane didn't crash in Seattle. It crashed on an island in Puget Sound

thirty-five miles south of Seattle. Even south of Tacoma. The island is just offshore of the town of Steilacoom, which no one outside the region could likely pronounce. (BTW, it's pronounced 'Still'-a-cum' )

[classof56]

7. That's where the state psychiatric hospital is located, right?

Grew up in that area, haven't been back in a decade or two, but will always remember how to pronounce Steilacoom. Did not realize there was an island just offshore, though. Hmmm!

Sad story, this one!

Peace.

[Aristus]

10. Yeah, Western State Hospital, built on the site of the old Fort Steilacoom.

To add to the confusion, there's a neighborhood not far from Steilacoom called Tillicum, pronounced the same way, only without the leading 'S'.

[steve2470]

11. I'm really glad this guy was ethical enough to crash on that island

It would have been so bad in an occupied area. I know he had two F-15's shadowing him, so I don't know what they would have done if they had seen him trying to crash in an occupied area. I've read they were trying to get him out to the Pacific Ocean, maybe to force him down in the ocean ?

I'm glad the residents of the whole Seattle-Tacoma area are ok. This story has just fascinated me from a psychiatric point of view and also the aviation aspect.

[JI7]

13. they would have shot it down if he started going towards populated areas

they were trying to get him to land on some base.

[Haggis for Breakfast]

9. I think we're all missing something here.

Richard Russell was a deeply disturbed man. Perhaps he was depressed. We have become too oblivious to the signs.

He knew how to take off and even how to fly. But he didn't know how to land. That tells me that he had no intention of ever landing in the first place. He went up there to die.

First he circled around the mountains and got to see their beauty from a perspective that few of us will ever experience. Perhaps he had second thoughts, but he never sounded panicked, rather he sounded in control of himself, almost resigned to the choice he had made.

His death saddens me (No, I didn't know him.) and I mourn his soul.

Rest in sweet peace, Richard Russell.

[steve2470]

12. I think he wanted one last joyride and then death

I think you're correct.