{"id":24450,"date":"2022-07-08T07:25:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-08T07:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kite47.com\/?p=24450"},"modified":"2022-07-08T07:41:59","modified_gmt":"2022-07-08T07:41:59","slug":"his-head-is-thrown-back-with-a-coy-expression-as-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/2022\/07\/08\/his-head-is-thrown-back-with-a-coy-expression-as-13\/","title":{"rendered":"His head is thrown back with a coy expression, as if the prompt had been \u201cGive me a sexy walrus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><title>His head is thrown back with a coy expression, as if the prompt had been \u201cGive me a sexy walrus<\/title><\/p>\n<p>The real Beebo Russell was <a href=\"https:\/\/hookupdate.net\/nudist-dating-adult-dating\/\">nudist finder<\/a> a man in despair who spent his final minutes scared, lightheaded, covered in his own sick, seeking a moment of Zen from thousands of feet in the air that never arrived. He&#8217;d set in motion a criminal plot he couldn&#8217;t walk back, and ultimately resolved to take his own life rather than return safely to the ground.<\/p>\n<p>The internet Beebo Russell is an archetype: a modern-day Icarus whose dramatic dying act has become a blank slate for others to project meaning upon that informs their own lives. They see a working man, broken down by indifferent bosses &#8211; a human cog in the airport machinery who suddenly revolted, stole an airplane, buzzed a volcano, sassed air-traffic controllers, and performed air-show stunts in a final dogged display of the human spirit. As one member of the Sky King community puts it, \u201cHis story&#8217;s true Americana.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The flesh-and-blood Russell would almost certainly have gotten a kick out of his internet alter ego, seeing his exploits become fodder for the same kind of dank expressions of edgy and viral humor he&#8217;d collected on Pinterest, and hoped to create himself. Meme World here I come!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the end, perhaps, it&#8217;s a meme that offers some sense of closure for Russell&#8217;s legacy. On a Pinterest board called \u201cBoom,\u201d he&#8217;d once pinned a \u201cdemotivational\u201d poster from Despair. It features a photo of a snowboarder careening off a towering, rocky cliff and bold capital letters that spell \u201cRegret.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt hurts to admit when you make mistakes,\u201d the smaller text reads. \u201cBut when they&#8217;re big enough, the pain only lasts a second.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Suicide is preventable. If you or someone you know is in crisis, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.<\/p>\n<p>Russell&#8217;s employee badge gave him access to both the tug and the remote cargo area. There was no lock on the door of the airplane. The cockpit was not secured.<!--more--> The biggest impediment Russell faced is that maneuvering a parked plane is a two-man job, and he had no accomplice. At 7:15 p.m., he hooked the tug to the front of the Q400, tossed aside the wheel blocks, and boarded the plane. Although trained to start the aircraft&#8217;s auxiliary power unit, Russell exceeded all authorization &#8211; toggling levers and switches in sequence to fire up the engines. He then hopped out, reboarded the tug, and swiveled the plane toward the taxiway.<\/p>\n<h2>Four minutes later there was an update: The pilot sounded suicidal<\/h2>\n<p>With a shock of half-groomed brown hair and a face full of freckles, Russell was funny, extroverted, \u201ca handful,\u201d relatives would later say; they all had \u201cBeebo stories.\u201d As a high schooler he hosted booze-free bonfires for friends; on his MySpace page, misbehaving looked like shotgunning cans of Mountain Dew with his bros. In one senior-yearbook photo, he is posed atop a boulder, legs out to the side, his long arms holding up his blocky frame. \u201d<\/p>\n<p>NORAD was already tracking Russell&#8217;s flight. Its Western Air Defense Sector was receiving updates on a 24\/7 phone line called the Domestic Events Network, or DEN. The first call from SeaTac came seven minutes into Russell&#8217;s flight.<\/p>\n<p>Were there warning signs? Russell was quietly fascinated with flight. \u201cI fly as much as I possibly can,\u201d he wrote in an online profile, listing a \u201cfloatplane tour through Misty Fjords National Monument\u201d in Alaska as one of the \u201cmost amazing\u201d things he&#8217;d done. For a graphic-design assignment at Washington State, he&#8217;d made a personal logo &#8211; a suitcase with straps reading \u201cRussell Hustle\u201d and a circular blue badge featuring a silhouette of what he described as a \u201cminimalistic Q400,\u201d in the center.<\/p>\n<h2>In , he boasted on his blog that he&#8217;d \u201cFinally learned Photoshop!<\/h2>\n<p>As Russell zoomed over the lush, green southern Puget Sound region, his flight raised alarm. \u201cWhat the hell?\u201d said a woman recording a cellphone video of the aircraft careening low over an exurban neighborhood. \u201cHoly shit,\u201d added a man&#8217;s voice. \u201cIt&#8217;s a fucking Alaska Airlines Q400. What the fuck is he doing over here?!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Through a panoply of task forces and subcommittees, TSA had been studying the insider threat since at least 2009. But by the report, TSA&#8217;s Aviation Security Advisory Committee was still struggling to formulate a basic definition for the term. Through 23 pages and appendices, the report offered no concrete recommendations except to praise \u201cthe DHS \u2018If You See Something, Say Something&#8217; campaign\u201d in which \u201cvigilant aviation workers reported suspicious activity to the airport operator.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As Russell&#8217;s exploit unfolded, SeaTac was bedlam. The after-incident report describes how Russell&#8217;s theft unleashed an \u201cad hoc, nonstandard notification of key first responders and executive leadership.\u201d It adds that \u201cattempts to ascertain if the plane was actually stolen caused a delay in contacting law enforcement\u201d including what it describes as a \u201c25-minute lag\u201d in notifying the FBI&#8217;s Joint Terrorism Task Force of the potential threat to national security.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAffirm,\u201d the first pilot said, allowing a chuckle of disbelief. \u201cHe cleared the surface of the water by approximately 10 feet.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Family and friends left a tribute to him on the island where he died. In the years since, he&#8217;s become something of a folk hero.<\/p>\n<p>NORAD, by contrast, responded with significant changes. Most important: It empowered its air-defense sectors to act without waiting for approval from higher-ups. \u201cWe now allow them to make the ble our fighters,\u201d says Armstrong. \u201cIt saves minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In short, a rupture now exists between the intimate tragedy of his short life and the public interpretation of it. \u201cIt happens a lot, where a real thing all of a sudden enters this spin cycle,\u201d Ostrower says, and \u201cit becomes this plotline in the realm of the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>His head is thrown back with a coy expression, as if the prompt had been \u201cGive me a sexy walrus The real Beebo Russell was nudist finder a man in despair who spent his final minutes scared, lightheaded, covered in his own sick, seeking a moment of Zen from thousands of feet in the air<a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/2022\/07\/08\/his-head-is-thrown-back-with-a-coy-expression-as-13\/\"> [&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4584],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24451,"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24450\/revisions\/24451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kite47.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}