we had a conversation earlier about air defense pursuit within the USA borders

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Airline employee steals plane from Sea-Tac, does aerial tricks with F-15s in pursuit before crashing on island south of Seattle

[www.geekwire.com]

A distressed Horizon Air employee stole one of the airline’s planes from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Friday night and roamed through the air with F-15 fighter jets in pursuit until the plane crashed on Ketron Island, southwest of Seattle, authorities said.

Air traffic at Sea-Tac Airport was temporarily grounded due to the security threat, according to reports from Horizon Air’s parent company, Alaska Air.

In audio recordings from the air traffic control system, the man flying the plane said that he was “just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess. Never really knew it, until now.”

A distressed Horizon Air employee stole one of the airline’s planes from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Friday night and roamed through the air with F-15 fighter jets in pursuit until the plane crashed on Ketron Island, southwest of Seattle, authorities said.

No passengers were aboard the Bombardier Q400 turboprop plane, and authorities did not immediately release information about the fate of the employee — but video from the scene showed burning debris strewn across the island.

Air traffic at Sea-Tac Airport was temporarily grounded due to the security threat, according to reports from Horizon Air’s parent company, Alaska Air.

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Governor Jay Inslee@GovInslee
There are still a lot of unknowns surrounding tonight's tragic incident of a stolen Horizon Airline plane. The responding fighter pilots flew alongside the aircraft and were ready to do whatever was needed to protect us, but in the end the man flying the stolen plane crashed.

Governor Jay Inslee@GovInslee
I want to thank the Air National Guard from Washington and Oregon for scrambling jets to keep Washingtonians safe. Those pilots are trained for moments like tonight and showed they are ready and capable.

F-15 jets chased the plane

The plane was a Q400, a Bombardier turboprop plane, one of about 40 the airline has in its fleet.

Within minutes of the plane's takeoff, the military scrambled two armed F-15 jets from Oregon to follow it, according to local and airline authorities and two sources with knowledge of the situation. They pursued the aircraft before it went down on Ketron Island, between Tacoma and Olympia.

"NORAD fighters did not fire upon the aircraft," North American Aerospace Defense Command said Saturday morning in a news release. The jets' capability was appropriate to the potential task, one of the sources said, without offering details.

F-15 "pilots kept plane out of harms way and people on ground safe," the sheriff's office tweeted. The jets were not involved in the crash, it said.

The cause of the crash wasn't immediately known, but the F-15s did not bring the plane down, Eckrote said.


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