By now many of you will have heard the strange and tragic tale of Rich Russell, the Horizon Air baggage handler who perished after taking a stolen Bombardier Q400 for a joyride on Friday. He’s gone now, leaving behind a bewildered wife and family, but the internet has dubbed him the Sky King.
In this post-9/11 world, Rich’s story is noteworthy in large part because the only life lost on his misadventure was his own. But Sky King’s last flight has lodged itself in the public consciousness due to the manifold mysteries surrounding the case. They still haven’t figured out how Rich, a ground services worker making minimum wage, managed to steal a 76-seat passenger aircraft by himself. Never mind the matter of how a man with no known pilot training pulled off a barrel roll in a commercial prop plane.
Listen to the audio of Rich’s conversation with air traffic control, and you get the impression of an affable, goofy guy with poor impulse control. We’ve seen enough hijackings to know this was not a guy with an axe to grind out to make a statement. Ideologues with martyr complexes always make sure the world knows the motive for their deadly theatrics. Rich didn’t leave a manifesto. No sinister agenda has surfaced in his wake. Friends and family all agree he was the original guy next door.
That’s not to say there was no reason for Rich’s theft and crashing of his employers’ plane. We live in a universe of cause and effect, and “randomness” is just statistical shorthand for “We don’t know why,” not “There is no why.”
This clip of Rich’s chat with the control tower contains a chilling hint at, if not his motive, at least one of the forces that influenced his suicide by joyride. Listen for yourself. What stands out?
One of Rich’s comments that sent up red flags with many listeners, and which is extra conspicuous due to the mainstream media’s deafening silence on it, occurred during this exchange at 2:47:
Most reports are calling Rich a Millennial. However, all list his age as 29 years old, which actually places him at the tail end of Generation Y.
Rich was born at the close of the 80s. He was old enough to have had memories of the real America’s last days. He would have been 12 when 9/11 happened.
It’s come to light that Rich and his wife owned a bakery for three years. Someone else has since taken over the company. It’s unknown why the Russells stopped running their business. All we know is that Rich had been reduced to a minimum-wage employee of a large corporation before he died.
Mourn for Rich Russell. We’ll never know exactly what got into his head that fateful evening. We do know he was born in America and died in a strange country–the country the rest of us a now living in.
Some call Sky King a hero. They’re wrong. Rich displayed no heroic virtues. In the end, he succumbed to rashness or despair. His final act is not to be praised or imitated.
Sky King does have wisdom to teach us. He may have felt the truth at his fingertips but was unable to grasp it. If an otherwise normal twentysomething American, aware that modern society has failed in its duty to provide the setting wherein he might flourish, can go full GTA on a commercial plane, imagine what the rest of us could do if moved by charity and a thirst for justice instead of despair.