SPOKANE, Wash. — New audio was released from the cockpit of a Seattle-bound Alaska Airlines flight last week that had to make an emergency detour to Eastern Washington after a passenger threatened to blow up the plane.
The incident happened four hours into the flight from Atlanta on July 5.
Court documents say 38-year-old Brandon Scott told a flight attendant that he had explosives and the plane had to land anywhere but Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
“We are a threat level three,” the pilot can be heard saying on the cockpit audio. “We’ve got 187 souls on board, four infants, two wheelchairs, 123 minutes of fuel on board.”
We played the audio for local pilot Brendan Ross, who told KIRO 7 that the crew did everything by the book, including their slow descent to Spokane.
“The pilots nailed it,” he noted. “They were hitting everything perfectly and so did air traffic control for that matter -- the passengers should be proud.”
Ross is no stranger to close calls himself, and says that this what pilots train for. Back in May, he had to make an emergency landing in Elliott Bay after the engine on his personal plane failed.
“Typically in an emergency situation you would say, ‘yes let’s get on the ground right away,’” Ross described. “But one of the factors when it comes to explosive devices is this might be something that is pressure sensitive, and as you know aircraft are pressurized, so if we go down too fast that’s going to change the pressurization in the aircraft at a rate that might detonate the bomb.”
“When it happens, you’re not scrambling, ‘thinking oh no what should we do in this emergency,’” he added. “Rather, you’re falling back on what you already know.”
For this more recent incident, Alaska flight 334 took off from Atlanta at 3:40 p.m. eastern time headed toward Seattle.
About four hours later, pilots made a distress call, saying they needed to divert to Spokane. The plane landed safely about 45 minutes later and Brandon Scott was immediately arrested. No explosives were found.
He later told police he was being targeted by members of a cartel, saying he wanted to be arrested to escape them.
Scott is charged with false information and hoaxes.