SKY KINGS - Stolen Planes, Broken Minds, & the Man Named Beebo

✈️🌲 EPISODE 12 — "SKY KINGS: STOLEN PLANES, BROKEN MINDS, AND THE MAN NAMED BEEBO" 🌲✈️

This episode is dedicated to my father, Fred Harvey — the best father a daughter could ever have. 💙

🛩️ On November 12, 1982, my dad went to work at the Cessna Aircraft Company facility in Wichita, Kansas — and one of his coworkers stole a brand new Citation I jet. The mechanic had no flight training. He flew a proper traffic pattern. He touched down 557 feet short of the runway and walked away. There is no Wikipedia page. No documentary. The story basically vanished — until I called my dad and asked him to tell me what really happened. 🔧

📅 Thirty-six years later, on August 10, 2018, it happened again.

A 29-year-old ground crew employee at Sea-Tac Airport named Richard Russell — friends called him kind, funny, thoughtful — used his authorized access to climb into a 70-seat Bombardier Q400 turboprop. He had never flown a plane in his life. He took off without clearance. He spent 75 minutes in the air over Puget Sound, talking to one extraordinary air traffic controller who tried to talk him home. ✈️

The internet called him Beebo. 💕

Tonight: 👇 🛩️ The 1982 Wichita Cessna theft — a story that vanished from history 👨‍💼 Who Richard Russell actually was — kind, married, struggling 🎙️ The 75-minute ATC conversation that still haunts people 🔄 The impossible question both stories ask 📋 The NTSB investigation and what it found 🔓 The security failure that wasn't malicious — it was a blind spot

⚖️ This is not a story about a folk hero. It is also not a story about a villain. It is a story about what happens when a person crosses an invisible line that nobody saw coming until it was already gone. The system failed Richard Russell — and the same system failed a Cessna mechanic in Wichita 36 years earlier. The question of why is bigger than either case.

⚠️ A note on care: this episode discusses mental health crisis and suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. You are not alone. ❤️

I'm Elizabeth Stanton. Thanks for killing time with me. ☕

📧 JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com 📍 Recorded in Derby, Kansas 🎙️ Listen everywhere podcasts are found

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Before we get into today's episode, I need to tell you a story that has nothing to do with it. Except that it has everything to do with it. My father, Fred Harvey, spent his career as an electrical engineer at both Boeing and Cessna. And today we're going to talk about the Cessna Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kansas. My father, he worked in the single engine division, the prop planes, the little guys, the ones you learned to fly in. And he designed the avionics. He was one of the people who decided what those cockpits looked like, what the instruments told you, whether the navigation systems talk to each other correctly. He spent decades doing just that, building things that had to work perfectly every single time because if they didn't, people died. And on November 12th, 1982, while he was working at the Cessna facility in Wichita, Kansas, one of his coworkers stole a jet. Not one of Dad's planes. A citation one, a twin-engine business jet. Its registration was November 2627 uniform. And it had 179 hours on it. Practically brand new, fresh off the assembly line. The man who stole it, he was a mechanic. Not a pilot, a mechanic. He had no active flight training. What he did have though was a diagnosed mental health condition and an active treatment plan that clearly was not working. Here's the detail my dad told me about made the whole thing kind of click into place for me. At Cessna, mechanics taxied planes around the facility all the time. It was a completely normal part of the job. So nobody thought twice about seeing an aircraft moving on the ground with the mechanic at the wheel, right? So when this mechanic climbed in and started that citation rolling, nobody panicked. Nobody called in because what he was doing looked exactly like what he was supposed to be doing. Right up until the moment he turned onto the active runway and pushed those throttles forward. That's when normal became something else entirely. He climbed way too steep, he stalled the aircraft, then he lowered the nose, uh, turned left, and then, I'm not making this up, flew a proper traffic pattern. He went downwind, base leg, final approach, like he'd seen the whole thing done a thousand times and was now running the playback. He touched down 557 feet short of the runway and hit the approach light stanchions. And he walked away. Zero fatalities, one destroyed aircraft, and one very confused NTSB report that lists the flight type as, I'm quoting, illegal smuggling. Which, sure, guys, that you know, that tracks. My dad went to work the next day and the day after that. And you know what people talked about? Not the official report, not the FAA investigation. They talked about what everyone talks about when something insane happens at the office. How far did he taxi before anyone realized? Who finally called it in? At what exact moment did somebody watching from a window understand this was not routine anymore? How does a guy with zero flight time just immediately not die in a jet? And maybe most importantly, how did anyone not know he was struggling that badly? That story lived in our house. That water cooler talk that never quite went away, a man who had no business being in a cockpit, who stole a plane from his own workplace, who somehow flew it and somehow survived. And I thought about that story a lot in August of 2018, because it happened again. Welcome to Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton. This is a true crime conspiracy and stories that keep us up at night. If you're new here, welcome. Buckle up, we don't do easy answers on this show. Tonight we're talking about a man the internet calls Bebo. His real name was Richard Russell, and he was 29 years old. He worked the ground crew at SeaTac Airport outside Seattle, Washington, and he had never flown a plane in his life. On August 10th, 2018, he stole a 70-seat turboprop aircraft, and he took off from one of the busiest airports on the West Coast. He spent 25 minutes in the air doing barrel rolls and figure eights over the Puget Sound. He had a genuinely moving conversation with air traffic control, and then he flew that plane into a small island and died. And the internet fell in love with him. Tonight we're going to figure out who Richard Bebo Russell really was and what was happening in his life, what the investigation found, and why this story still haunts people years later. But I want to keep that cold open in your head the whole time because what happened here in Wichita in 1982 and what happened at CTAG in 2018 are in some ways the same story. 36 years apart, different planes, different men, different outcomes, but the same impossible question underneath all of it. What makes a person decide to do something like that? Richard Russell was, by every account, a good guy. He was born in 1989. He grew up in Wasilla, Alaska. Friends and co-workers described him as funny, kind, and thoughtful, the kind of person who remembered your name, who asked follow-up questions, who showed up for people. And by August of 2018, he'd been working for Horizon Air, a regional carrier operated by Alaska Airlines for about three and a half years. His job title was ground service agent. He loaded luggage, he marshalled planes, he drove tongues. He was the one person making sure everything worked correctly on the ground so that people in the air could do their jobs. And he was technically authorized to move aircraft on the ground. That part's going to matter. According to the Seattle Times in August of 2018, Horizon Air employee records confirmed he was a credentialed ground operations employee with a tow vehicle access. He was married. His wife Mindy had spoken publicly about that day, and she described him as somebody who struggled, who had moments of darkness, and he kept mostly to himself. But she also described him as a person she loved. And there's a video he made with Mindy that went viral after the incident. Just the two of them goofing around, laughing in the kitchen. It's really hard to watch. Richard, though, he liked flight simulators. He played them at home. He'd posted online about aviation. He was interested in planes, a way a lot of people who work around them every day get interested. You spend enough time watching them take off and land, and you start to wonder what it would be like to be the one in the seat. And by every account, he had no formal flight training, none. What he had was a job that put him next to aircraft every single day, and a working knowledge of how they moved on the ground, and apparently a very good memory for whatever he'd watched and read about how they moved in the air. It was a Friday evening at SeaTac, just south of Seattle, one of the 25 busiest airports in the United States. And at approximately 7:32 p.m. Pacific time, a Horizon Air Bombardier Q400 turboprop registration, uh Charlie G A GLHA began moving on the tarmac. 45 tons of aircraft, 86 feet long with a wingspan of 93 feet. Nobody was supposed to be flying it. It was parked, it was empty, it was supposed to stay that way. According to the NTSB accident report, they said Richard Russell used a pushback tug to maneuver the Bombardier Q-400 out of its parking position. When the tug disconnected, he remained in the cockpit. And at 7:32 p.m., the aircraft began its takeoff roll on runway 16C. So 16C. Richard had used that pushback tug to maneuver the aircraft out of its parking position, which again was the normal part of his job. Ground crew moved planes all the time. The usual, unusual thing was that when the tug disconnected, he just decided to stay in the cockpit. At 732, the Q-400 began its takeoff roll on runway 16C. No clearance, no flight plan, no copilot, and no passengers. Air traffic control realized almost immediately something was wrong. The Q-400 climbed out over Puget Sound, heading southwest, climbing to about 400 feet and then higher. ATC was scrambling, trying to figure out what they were even looking at. And then the radio crackled and Richard Russell started talking. What happened over the next 75 minutes was one of the strangest, most human, most heartbreaking conversations ever captured on an ATC recording. Richard wasn't screaming, he wasn't ranting, he was calm, he was funny, and he was in the way that makes this story so difficult to process, just completely himself. He told the controllers he was sorry. He said he didn't want to hurt anyone. He talked about the people in his life who cared about him, and he knew that what he was doing was going to disappoint them. He talked about the view, and he said something about it being beautiful. And the controller who handled most of that call was extraordinary. He was patient, professional, and very calm. And he tried to talk Richard through the idea of landing, told him there were people who could help, and that the runway was right there, that he didn't have to do this. Richard asked if he could do a barrel roll. The controller gently, carefully said, I don't think that's a good idea. But Richard, he did the barrel roll anyway. And he pulled it off. Imperfectly, but he pulled it off in a 70-seat regional turboprop with no training. And then he kept talking and he said he was sorry for the mess he was going to leave. He said he hadn't meant for it to go this way. He talked about his childhood, he mentioned being hungry, and he laughed in a way that people laugh when they're out of options. At one point, he said something that stuck with people for a long time afterward. Something to the effect of, I've got a few screws loose, I guess. Never knew it until now. That's the line, that's the whole episode in one sentence. What does it mean to not know something is wrong with you until the moment you do something irreversible? I keep coming back to that because it suggests for Richard, and maybe for the man in Wichita in 1982, and maybe for a lot of people we never hear about because nothing dramatic happens to them. There's no warning bell. There's no moment where you sit down and decide. There's just a regular Friday evening until suddenly there isn't. And then the rest of your life narrows down to a cockpit, a radio, and one extraordinary stranger trying to talk you home. The controller. Oh, this gets me kind of choked up. God bless him, uh, whoever he is. He stayed on the line and he kept talking. He kept trying. He offered the runway one more time. But Richard said he was not going to go to jail. And at 8 46, the Q-400 went down over Ketron Island in the south end of Puget Sound, a small, wooded, mostly uninhabited place. The crash was, in the technical sense, survivable. The aircraft hit trees and terrain rather than going in at full speed. But Richard Bebo, Russell, did not survive. The NTSB later determined he died from blunt force trauma on impact. And there were no other casualties. According to the NTSB final report, the cause of death was confirmed by Pierce County Medical Examiner, August of 2018. The NTBS, sorry, the NTSB investigation, it took over a year, and the final report came out in 2019. What they found was both straightforward and deeply unsettling. Richard had used his un his authorized access to an operations area to board and to take off in an aircraft he was never supposed to fly. There was no mechanical failures, no co-conspirator, no grand plan. And with the report, basically it described was a man in crisis who made one decision and then made a series of smaller decisions that followed from it, each one taking him farther away from any possible return. The NTSB report said, probable cause, the deliberate, unauthorized operation of an aircraft by a person who was not a qualified pilot with an intentional crash. The security questions were significant. How does a ground crew employee boarded aircraft undetected at one of the country's busiest airports? The answer? It just wasn't hard. Credentialed employees move aircraft on the ground all the time. Nobody had built a system to stop the person who was never supposed to be a threat in the first place. The FAA and the TSA reviewed their access protocols after the incident. Multiple airlines tightened their procedures. Whether those changes were sufficient, honestly, is a different conversation. The security failure here wasn't malicious negligence. It was a blind spot. Nobody at CTAC was being lazy or incompetent. They'd built a system designed to keep dangerous people out, you know, terrorists, bad people, uh, people who didn't belong on the tarmac. What they hadn't built, what nobody had built, was a system that could see Richard Russell. Because Richard belonged there right up until the moment he didn't. And that's the uncomfortable truth of this story. The threat wasn't somebody trying to break in, it was somebody who already had the keys. Horizon Air and Alaska Airlines both released statements and they spoke about Richard as a valued employee. They both expressed condolences and they cooperated with the investigation. His wife, Mindy, she spoke publicly and she said she had no warning. She said she didn't understand, and she said she was trying to. And the internet, for a brief, strange window of time, turned Richard Russell into a folk hero. The barrel rule, the laughter, the calm. People posted tributes. They called him Bebo after a character in a TV show. And they made memes and they made songs. And then the discourse shifted the way it always does to whether any of that was okay. And I don't have, you know, a side to take on this folk hero stuff, whether it was appropriate or not. What I think is more interesting is that both reactions, the grief and the folk heroicism, was real. And both came from the same place. People saw themselves in him, or they saw somebody they knew in him, or they saw something they had felt themselves and never said out loud. That recognition is what made the story stick, not the plane theft, not the barrel roll, but the recognition. It's the intrusive thoughts, I think, sometimes. And uh I think that's what makes people identify with Russell is, you know, just the intrusive thoughts. The NTSB report tells you what happened. It doesn't really tell you why. His wife said she that he had been struggling with what exactly she didn't fully specify. Depression is the word people use: a feeling of being trapped, of not mattering, of things piling up quietly until they don't. Richard didn't leave a note. What he left was 75 minutes of audio. And if you listen to that audio, really listen to it, you hear someone who wasn't angry, wasn't violent, was in some ways more at peace in those 75 minutes than he'd been in a long time. And he got to fly for the first and only time in his life over the water in the light, he got to do the barrel rule. And I don't really know what to do with any of that. I don't think any of us do. And this is the part of the story that I genuinely cannot resolve. And I want to be honest with you about that because I think you can tell when a podcaster is faking certainty, right? So I'm gonna tell you the truth. I don't know what the right way to feel about this is. I know that Richard Russell took a piece of equipment that didn't belong to him and put a lot of other people at risk while he was doing it. I know what he did caused real grief and real fear. I know all of that. And I also know that when I listen to that ATC audio, what I hear is somebody who needed someone to talk to. Somebody who, for whatever reason, never quite got the help that would have made this avoidable. Both of those things can be true, and the fact that both things are true is what makes this episode so hard to wrap up cleanly. There isn't a bow, there's just a man and an airplane and a controller who tried his best, and a wife who didn't see it coming, and the rest of us trying to make sense of something that may actually never make sense. So remember that story I told you at the beginning, November 12th, 1982, which Todd Dwight D. Eisenhower Airport. It's a mechanic at the Cessna facility. He is diagnosed with a serious mental health condition. He's actively in treatment and he steals a brand new Citation 1 jet and takes off without authorization. Nobody died, the plane was totaled, and the mechanic walked away. The NTSB classified this flight type as illegal smuggling, which is, in my opinion, one of the funniest bureaucratic errors I've ever encountered. And I say that with full respect for the seriousness of what actually happened that day. So my father was at work that day. He was in the single engine division, prop planes, not jets. So it wasn't his cockpit, wasn't his avionics, but it was his facility, his coworkers, his water cooler, and the rest of my childhood. That story lived in our house as a thing that happens when everything breaks down. A man in crisis, an airplane he had no business flying, a choice that probably didn't feel like a choice. Does that sound familiar? So 36 years, two different airports, two different aircraft, two completely different outcomes, but with the same question underneath all of it. What makes a person climb into a cockpit that they have no right to be in and just go? Alright, time killers, you know. What time is it? It is Time Killer Files time. And I have three things I need from you tonight. And I'm not playing around on it. Question one. Did you know about the 1982 witch taught incident before tonight? I'm generally curious about this one because outside of aviation accident circles, this story has basically vanished. There's no Wikipedia page, no documentary, no podcast episode that I know of, nothing. Before my dad told me about it, I'd never heard of it myself. So if you grew up in Kansas, if you ever worked at Cessnet, if your family was in aviation in the 80s, did this ever cross your radar? I want to know. Because when I was researching for this story, I could find no documentation on it. And so my father actually had to pull the NTSB record for me and send to me so that I had this information because the internet thought I was making this story up. It's kind of crazy. So question two. When the Bebo story broke in 2018, where were you? And what was your first reaction? Were you one of the people who felt that weird pull of understanding something you just quite can't quite explain? Or were you horrified? Or both? Because I think a lot of us were both. And I want to talk about it. So tell me about your Bebo thoughts and moment. And question three: this is one is the big one. This is the one I'm going to be asking you every single episode from here on out. Because Time Killers, this is your show, too. Send me your stories, your original hometown stories of murder, conspiracy, or unsolved crime. The thing that happened in your town that never made the news. The case that still doesn't make sense to you. The death, the official story that does not account for it. The disappearance from the next county over, the rumor your grandmother told you about in a house that nobody lives in anymore. I'm turning your submission into just killing time files, a dedicated episode where I read your stories aloud. Real stories, real people, real unsolved weirdness from the time killers themselves. So think about like my dad's story. Nobody on the internet could find it, right? And so I'm telling you his story, backed up with fact because of the NTSB record. So here's how it works: send me your story. I will read it on this show, your name, or just your first name, or anonymous, your choice. The story has to be true, or at least true to you. It can be something that happened to you directly, something you witnessed, something a relative told you, something you just can't stop thinking about. It does not have to be solved. In fact, the unsolved ones are okay too. Send everything to just killing time podcast at gmail.com and put time killer files in the subject line so I know it's you. And I read every single one of your emails, every single one. I promise. Richard Russell took off from CTAC at 7.32 p.m. on a Friday evening in August, 75 minutes later. He was gone. And I encourage you, if you have not heard the audio, it is hauntingly beautiful. I would encourage you to go find the audio and listen to those 75 minutes. Um it is something to it's something to hear. And you can almost picture yourself sitting in the airplane with Richard. So after those 75 minutes, he was gone. The man in Wichita in 1982, whose name I still don't know, and maybe never will, walked away from a crashed Cessna jet on a November afternoon and went back to whatever life he was that he had before. There's two men, two planes, two moments where the completely ordinary, a mechanic, taxi, and aircraft, a ground agent moving a turboprop crossed an invisible line nobody saw coming until it was already gone. I I don't have a clean conclusion for you. I don't think there is one. What I have is my dad's voice on the phone when I called to ask about it. You know, this is 40 plus years later, and he still remembers the day this guy stole the jet. The way people talked about it and the questions nobody could answer. Some stories they just don't go away, they just wait. I'm Elizabeth Stanton. This has been just killing time. Thank you for killing some time with me today. And fly high, Richard.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrail. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.