Day 39 - 8th Feb
TACOBET
Loop the loop
In something too big
Clear the lake
by feet
Commercial jets and fighter planes
Sharing the sky like it's nothing strange
Calmness
Aviate navigate communicate
Cocktail tonic
of Cockpit voice
And the leveling smell of fuel
Erratic
Explain it all away
Nice guy gone astray
Few screws loose
Tighten those next time
In my pre-flight flow
Encephalopathy
Check.
Heads will try to flow
Where the heart wants to go
But the head does not know
How to get there
It can simulate
And speculate
But not advocate
It can aviate and navigate
Cannot communicate
The hearts desire.
Can affect a voice
affect a choice
Take off
Not land
This it cannot conceive
Will not believe
Crash
It will always crash
It’s chemtrails
Become
Upside-down fishing lines
Baiting men down
From the sky
Into Puget sound
The fighter jets will pull up before the island
But know this
They also execute
Barrel rolls
In front of crowds who go 'Ooooh!'
Sometimes shadow pulls them down too
Less naked in the flames,
Same goofy end
Get out of the simulator
And into your heart
Throttle the parts
That need to be throttled
Do not go gently into that night
Just skip the flight
altogether - and hike
to Tacobet.
No sin - to fail
So realise
the only sin - is to sip
Pre-flight cocktail
Of fear and fantasy
And fetishise
Niall Campbell
Yesterday, the algorithm put something in front of me. A grainy video: a plane flying where it shouldn’t. The background audio—someone on the ground, half-laughing, half-panicked: "What the fuck is that plane doing here?" Underneath it, subtly, the swell of Outro by M83. Then comes the voice—warm, goofy, a veneer of calm. Not a cosplay voice this time, but the real thing: a cockpit voice, a man in the air talking to air traffic control, negotiating in a way that wasn’t really negotiation at all. Because the hostage here wasn’t a person. It was an empty plane, a Bombardier Q400, a short-haul commuter aircraft that had no business performing barrel rolls over Puget Sound.
Richard Russell wasn’t supposed to be a name anyone knew. He was a baggage handler at Sea-Tac Airport. A churchgoer. A married man. Someone whose world, to anyone looking in, seemed solid enough. Then, on August 10, 2018, he walked onto the tarmac, climbed into the cockpit of a plane he had no licence to fly, and took off. He wasn’t a pilot, but he’d watched them. Listened to them. He’d sat in cockpits while planes taxied, cleaned up after passengers, handled cargo, watched flight crews come and go. He had enough knowledge to start the engines, to get the aircraft moving, to push the throttle forward and lift into the sky. And that was enough. The controllers tried to guide him down, calling him “Rich,” speaking softly, as if he could be talked back to something stable. But he was already gone. He joked about learning to fly from video games. He complimented the air traffic controller for his radio skills. He worried about what this would do to his family. He laughed at his own audacity, at the absurdity of it all. And at some point, he apologised. “I got a few screws loose, I guess. Never really knew it until now.”
Fighter jets scrambled, trailing him but never intercepting. He wasn’t a threat. Not to anyone but himself. He took the plane up, threw it into loops, defied physics in ways that left actual pilots stunned. And then, after almost an hour, he stopped rolling. The plane nosed down toward the water. He crashed into a small island in Puget Sound. No one else was hurt. No one else was even really involved. In the news cycle, the whole thing barely registered. No passengers, no terrorism, no scandal. The plane became a rounding error on an insurance claim. The wreckage was cleared. The investigation filed. The story—officially—ended. But online, something else happened. People held onto it. Replayed it. Stared at it. Tried to understand it. There’s a reason stories like this don’t just disappear. There was something too human about it, something too ambiguous. It didn’t fit into a category. It wasn’t a hero’s journey. It wasn’t a crime. It wasn’t an act of political violence or an accident of incompetence. It was just a man—an ordinary man—doing something extraordinary, something cinematic, something final. And when people saw it, they poured themselves into it.
Some called him reckless. Others said he was sick. Some saw him as a man who had finally tasted freedom. Others saw him as a man who had simply run out of options. But they all agreed—whatever he did, they weren’t doing it. Because this is the thing. We say we want freedom. We say we want adventure. We say we want to escape. But we sit, and we scroll, and we watch someone else do it. We watch the loops, the plumes of exhaust, the final descent, and we project onto it whatever we need it to be. There’s a mythology to it, a kind of dark romanticism that attaches itself to moments like this. People talk about it like it was a grand gesture, like it was the final act of someone breaking free from a life too small for them. But was it?
The hard thing isn’t breaking away. It isn’t taking the controls and pushing the throttle forward and launching into something too big to handle. The hard thing is staying. The hard thing is creating something that lasts. The hard thing is making something meaningful out of the materials in front of you, instead of burning them all to the ground. And maybe that’s why it lingers. It wasn’t just about him. It was about us. About the line between action and fantasy. About how we fetishise escape without ever really pursuing it. But the thing is, what he did wasn’t really escape at all. It just looked like it. Because the easiest thing in the world is to crash. The hardest thing is to create something that lasts. And maybe that’s the real difference. Not between flying and falling, but between the things we romanticise and the things we actually do.