Plane stolen, crashes near SeaTac Airport

The entire narrative under "Flight details" is absolutely incredible.

 

Yep, that’s it. Damn right. A FedEx employee (friend) at Memphis told me about it. Well prior to 9/11.

Now, THAT fully loaded plane was found to have exceeded its design specs because of the seriously wounded pilot’s evasive maneuvering to throw the attacker off his feet. The plane could have broken up in midair.

 

Here’s a transcript of the FedEx attack. If I can find the actual audio recording, you can follow this transcript to make more sense out of what you are hearing, which is, of course, harrowing to hear.

Fedex 705 CVR Transcript

 

Surprised that hasn't been made into a movie. Figure you could do it cheaply, only needing a dozen or so actors (more if you want to flesh out the backstory), It would make people say "Sully who?".

 

It's a cargo plane. Not enough plot lines there to go 90 minutes.

 

The guy really had this thing planned out, down to watching the crews and their schedules. He scheduled his jumpseat flight for a crew of three women, thinking they’d be easier to overpower. But that crew got bumped - their max time on the clock timed out due to some delays.

So, the flight crew changed out to three guys that were substantially bigger.

You want another depth to the story? Find that originally scheduled flight crew, and work them into the before and after. Whew, talk about how a few minutes could change your fate.

 

Pretty good summary. I caught three errors in the subtitles - Calloway was scheduled as a deadhead passenger to sit in the jump seat. He was NOT the flight engineer of the first crew, nor of the second crew. There was something else in there that wasn’t right, but I can’t remember it at the moment.

The video used the ATC recordings.

The CVR has audio of the whole fight. Screaming, cussing, scary as all hell.

 

How on earth did this dude learn how to fly a plane? This has not been reported. He must of had many hours on a flying simulator just like the 9/11 boys. Perhaps this might be a national security concern.

 

You'd be surprised what flight simulation programs on computers can do. Might not so much be what they teach you, but they get you familiar and comfortable with how planes work, and where things are. Shoot even I know you throttle up and once you hit speed you pull the stick back to take off. A guy working around the planes? Has a few conversations with some pilots? Not surprised at all.

 

He mentions learning from “playing video games” in the audio.

 

Saw a link on Twitter this morning that he was a ramp worker not a mechanic. Also said he was part of the tow crew.

As already mentioned with video games and sims flying is not super hard. Pilots get paid for when something goes wrong and most passenger planes today are fully automated, just need to know what buttons to push.

If he was a Tow Crew agent then he had a good working knowledge of taxi and runways and wouldn’t have had much trouble knowing where to go to get the plane in the right position for take off. Tow crew agents know where most of the switches and buttons are, bit of time in a video game sim and away you go.

Stealing a plane like this guy did would be remarkably easy.