who stole the plane

[Orlaam 306]

Hate to dredge up an old topic, but...

I have found some comments from Richard Russell's mother.  She says he was not mentally ill or disordered (e.g., bipolar, drug addict, alcohol).  The wife was very loving and supportive towards him.  He had tried to enter the military or police, but was unable for some reason.  I'm a little surprised the military wouldn't take him (she mentioned weight).  The police I can understand, they're unusually strict/rigid/competitive.  He had a bachelors degree as well.  He had tried to move up the ladder in the company and was always passed over.  Other than that, she said he was impulsive and had been involved a lot in sports that might result in head injury.  She states "he loved life" and they are very confused about his actions.  I don't think any of them are able to wrap their heads around it.  She even remarked that the fact that he was able to pilot the plane at all confuses her.

[nealmac 260]

4 hours ago, Orlaam said:

Hate to dredge up an old topic, but...

I have found some comments from Richard Russell's mother.  She says he was not mentally ill or disordered (e.g., bipolar, drug addict, alcohol).  The wife was very loving and supportive towards him.  He had tried to enter the military or police, but was unable for some reason.  I'm a little surprised the military wouldn't take him (she mentioned weight).  The police I can understand, they're unusually strict/rigid/competitive.  He had a bachelors degree as well.  He had tried to move up the ladder in the company and was always passed over.  Other than that, she said he was impulsive and had been involved a lot in sports that might result in head injury.  She states "he loved life" and they are very confused about his actions.  I don't think any of them are able to wrap their heads around it.  She even remarked that the fact that he was able to pilot the plane at all confuses her.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, I know she was his mother, but mental illness is not always visible and just because she says so, it doesn't mean he wasn't mentally ill. An extremely close friend of mine took his own life a couple of years back, and everyone thought he was happy, loved life and was very outgoing. That's the problem with mental illness, especially depression. The sufferer makes it look like nothing's wrong, but on the inside they are being torn apart.

 

Obviously, I'm not a doctor or anything, but I do know that when someone claims that another person isn't mentally ill, I'll always take that with a pinch of salt.

[Chock 17,769]

As Neal mentions, not everyone is inclined to reveal what's inside, even to close friends and family, and sometimes close friends and family could be the last people who'd ever know about something, in spite of imagining they'd be the ones whom someone would confide in. I, and I am sure many others on these forums, have known people who've committed suicide, yet seemed to be perfectly happy the last time you saw them. It can be difficult for some people to voice what they truly feel.

But, in saying that, I am not completely convinced that suicide was the definite 'set in stone' intent of Richard Russell, it might have been in the plan there somewhere as a possibility, but from an emotional standpoint things are sometimes not quite as cut and dried as is often popularly conveyed. Humans are infinitely complicated beings.

There are one or two things he says to ATC which don't quite sound - to me at least - like they'd come from someone completely resigned to death. For example, saying he did not want to go near an AFB because he feared they might shoot at him with anti-aircraft defenses doesn't sound like a comment someone looking for a spectacular way out would make. Similarly, joking about getting a job as a pilot if he landed the thing, whilst it could be purely just a joke, tends to indicate that the idea of jobs - and by definition, therefore also a future - was still in those thought processes somewhere.

But let's be clear here, unless the CVR of that Dash 8 reveals him chattering to himself when the transmit button is off, saying something as cast iron-proof obvious as: 'and now let's crash this thing' or 'gee, I hope I can manage to get it down in one piece', then we are never truly going to know what his state of mind, nor his ultimate intent was. To most of us distant observers it hardly matters anyway; unless one knew him personally and is looking for some closure, the fact is he's dead whatever his intent and motivation might have been and it doesn't really make much difference to us personally.

It seems fairly clear however - since he did actually mention it - that poor wages were at least in some part a contributory factor in motivating him to do what he did, but I suspect that couldn't be the only thing, or at least one would hope so, otherwise we'd probably have three quarters of the world's population flipping out and doing similar things. Nevertheless, money troubles are, generally speaking, the root of a lot of incidents and problems, and it may simply be that was the case here, albeit leading to a rather spectacular action as a result of it.

Edited August 29, 2018 by Chock

[nealmac 260]

Just to clarify, I didn't mean it sound like I definitely thought he WAS mentally ill. I was just putting it out there, that unless a doctor/psychiatrist diagnosed / didn't diagnose him, we don't actually know. His mother saying that he was "fine" isn't proof of anything.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

7 hours ago, nealmac said:

Just to clarify, I didn't mean it sound like I definitely thought he WAS mentally ill. I was just putting it out there, that unless a doctor/psychiatrist diagnosed / didn't diagnose him, we don't actually know. His mother saying that he was "fine" isn't proof of anything.

Just his actions alone were a sign of a mental imbalance, people do not do those things out of the norm if they are mentally balanced.  I could hear it in his voice, he did not sound right, whether it was from injury or not the problem was still neurological, which is what mental illness is, mental illness has a terrible stigma because it is thought we can just work our way out of it.  It is caused by neurological problems in the brain's wiring that a physician, not a psychologist with no medical degree, needs to fix.  Psychologists are good for those who are just lonely and need someone to talk to, they are great for that, but not for deep seated mental illness that would drive someone to suicide or to harm others, or both.

John

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

Everyone has a mental health issue in some form or other, but the severity various from person to person, and yes blokes are notorious for hiding things from people.

I have been raising money in the past years for cancer societies, but last year we switched to fundraising for the Mental Health Foundation. What I noticed was how easy it is to raise money for Cancer compared to Mental Health. People still shy away from Mental Health issues but open wallets for other things. A friend also told me in the middle of the campaign who works in the field said that if you can have better support for mental health you will actually lower cancer risks. People with mental health issues are more likely to get cancer due to smoking or other activities. Also people are more likely to give money to cancer societies even though the number of people they know with cancer is extremely low, and the number of people they know with mental health issues are much higher, even with that they still don't recognize the importance of it. 

Just some food for thought....

Edited August 29, 2018 by Matthew Kane

[Guest]

Or he just "snapped" ... this is a fairly frequent occurrence among us Humans (as population growth increases the occurrences will increase also and more odds of such occurrences being reported and/or caught on camera/audio).  Perhaps this is a reflection of just how little we know about the inner workings of the Brain and our biological process and that behavioral pattern recognition still relies on an established pattern. 

We see people snap all the time, from Accountants that go to Las Vegas and start shooting people (58 dead 800+ injured) with no prior behavioral pattern or criminal record ... he just snapped.

We can only make educated guesses and assumptions ... we have far to go in understanding what being Human is and we chip away at it every day and events like this and others will increase as our population increases.  When this person did snap it was fortunate other lives where not lost ... a good read: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-brain/201610/humans-are-genetically-predisposed-kill-each-other ... several books on "why we snap".  Everyone can snap and we don't have all the behavioral answers/patterns.

Cheers, Rob.

[Orlaam 306]

Well my point was that no overt conditions existed to explain his actions.  A large number of people have insisted he was SMI, but he was able to hold down and job and function fine in school.  Mild affective disorders (e.g., dysthymia, atypical mood disorder) may present with subtle signs only.  Repeated brain injury results in impulsivity and that seems rather core to suicidality.  Nevertheless, many people attempt of complete suicide as a result of a trigger they perceive too much for their ego. 

I just wanted people to know that his demons were not very apparent to folks around him.  I knew a kid in high school who got mixed up with a gang.  I don't know if he was buying marijuana or what.  It didn't seem like a big deal but he got on their bad side.  Word was out that they were looking for him.  He stopped coming to school shortly before that.  He hung himself in his family's apartment at probably 15 years old.  A normal reaction would be to tell a parent or someone you did something stupid and you're afraid now.  But he chose to impulsively end it all right there. 

The Vegas incident was well planned and not as much an impulsive event I feel.  He planned that for some odd reason and ruminating about such an event for a long enough time that he accepted the action and outcome.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

14 hours ago, Orlaam said:

Well my point was that no overt conditions existed to explain his actions.  A large number of people have insisted he was SMI, but he was able to hold down and job and function fine in school.  Mild affective disorders (e.g., dysthymia, atypical mood disorder) may present with subtle signs only.  Repeated brain injury results in impulsivity and that seems rather core to suicidality.  Nevertheless, many people attempt of complete suicide as a result of a trigger they perceive too much for their ego. 

I just wanted people to know that his demons were not very apparent to folks around him.  I knew a kid in high school who got mixed up with a gang.  I don't know if he was buying marijuana or what.  It didn't seem like a big deal but he got on their bad side.  Word was out that they were looking for him.  He stopped coming to school shortly before that.  He hung himself in his family's apartment at probably 15 years old.  A normal reaction would be to tell a parent or someone you did something stupid and you're afraid now.  But he chose to impulsively end it all right there. 

The Vegas incident was well planned and not as much an impulsive event I feel.  He planned that for some odd reason and ruminating about such an event for a long enough time that he accepted the action and outcome.

The human mind is simply a mystery, and "going postal" when an outwardly normal worker or person suddenly snaps is always confusing as to why.  We have so many triggers in our society, his may have not come from his wife or workplace, but maybe some online encounter or some encounter when he was out on his own, and although suicidal he seemed to want to go out of his way to avoid hurting people, which makes me wonder if his was a suicide at all.  He may have just decided to crash and hope for the best to avoid hurting people, hard to say.  This is certainly a very different aircraft incident than the disgruntled air employee who brought down a PSA BAE 146 in 1987, right after I had come home from a trip to Europe which shook my parents up because I flew PSA often and contemplated a followup trip to Socal at that time.  That is the only other domestic flight I know of where an aircraft was not in control of the pilots when it crashed although there may be others.  There was also the CRJ incident when two pilots tried to get an empty CRJ to climb to its supposed certified ceiling of 41,000 feet, only to lose control and crash.  I remember we discussed that here in hangar chat too.

John