Off into the wild blue yonder…
Via Fox News:
A Horizon Air passenger plane crashed on an island in Puget Sound Friday night, not long after a suspect conducted an “unauthorized take-off” from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington state, officials said.
Witnesses reported seeing a large plume of smoke in the air above Ketron Island after the plane went down. No passengers were believed to be aboard the Q400 aircraft, airport officials said.
No one on the sparsely inhabited island was believed to have been injured, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department said on Twitter.
The unidentified pilot was a 29-year-old “suicidal male,” the sheriff’s department said. The Seattle Times reported that he was a Horizon Air employee from Sumner, Wash.
The drama played out in real time on the Internet as the public was able to hear the suspect communicating with air traffic controllers via the air traffic control scanner.
“I’ve got a lot of people that care about me. It’s going to disappoint them to hear that I did this. I would like to apologize to each and every one of them. Just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess,” the suspect said, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
In another instance, the suspect joked whether the airline would hire him as a pilot if he landed the plane safely.
Pierce County Sheriff Paul Pastor said the man “did something foolish and may well have paid with his life.”
The sheriff’s department said it was launching a background investigation on the suspect.
The man, who was addressed as “Rich” in audio recordings with air traffic controllers, said he didn’t want to land at a nearby military base because, “Those guys will rough me up if I try and land there.”
The crash of the Q400 — described as a 76-seat aircraft designed for short trips — occurred because the pilot was “doing stunts in air or lack of flying skills,” the sheriff’s department said.