Guy steals a plane and crashes it

that story of that guy stealing the airplane was crazy I just read that yesterday. the guy had no pilots licenses I am surprised he got the plane off the ground ,wild

 

Sounds like no one saw him as a high-flyer.

 

Ban semiautomatic assault planes!

 

Was going to start a thread about this myself.

This article has more details than the video.

It appears that he learnt about how to operate it from a video game.

 

"Nah I'm a White guy!"

 

I would guess that he used one of Microsoft's flight simulators and supplemented the starting procedures with youtube. They're technically video games, but they pretty much have all the accurate procedures/systems that are seen in aviation. The full motion flight simulators at my flight school used their software for some for our training.

Not surprised that he crashed. Dash-8s are hard enough to land when there are two qualified transport pilots at the helm. Just watch one land in a crosswind and you'll see why

 

The dude never planned on landing.

 

Wow! So you're training to be a pilot?

 

Some of the people hurting the most are basically invisible, and that makes the pain worse. Think of Robin Williams - always seemed happy and cheerful, and made other people smile, but the pain became too much for him.

 

Maybe. We'll see what the NTSB report shows once it's made public. I'll be interested to see what they say about the flight profile.

 

That was years ago, I'm a commercial pilot now.

 

Even though it was idiotic I still feel bad for him.

 

I work for an airline as a mechanic. I work on 737's and know how to start the engines. Taxi without crashing, maybe. Taking off, no way. Landing, no way but I wouldn't be able to get it off the ground in the first place. (Just in case, for everyone's FYI, I have a wonderful paying job and there's no way in hell I want to loose it. I'd never do anything nutso at work.)

It's actually easy to start the engines of a 737 but there are several steps. No one with zero knowledge of the plane can figure it out on their own by jumping into a cockpit and fiddling around.

There are a couple of things in regards to the internet and flight simulators that interest me: 1. The amount of information out there. 2. The accuracy of the information. You can learn a lot of things about every operating commercial airliner right now with the info you can gather from the internet and publicly available flight simulator programs. Anyone here can sit down and with a little research figure out how to start an aircraft engine. So it's not really an amazing thing that this guy wasn't a pilot. He just know how to use the internet and flight simulators.

Also you learn a lot from observing and talking to the pilots. This guy would have been able to talk to pilots frequently.

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As far as having a crazy idea and doing it. I went up to three cute flight attendants at work and started a conversation. That's huge for me! LOL! (I know, I'm such a loser).