THE airline employee who stole an empty plane, took off from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and crashed into a small island has been revealed as 29-year-old Richard Russell.

The married ground service agent “hijacked” the plane before taking it for a ride as he was pursued by fighter jets.

Authorities have not confirmed his identity, but friends and co-workers of Russell have confirmed the news on socialmedia.

At a press conference on Saturday, authorities said the 29-year-old man was a 3.5-year Horizon employee and had clearance to be among aircraft.

They also revealed he used a machine called a ‘pushback tractor’ to first manoeuvre the aircraft so he could board and then take off Friday evening local time.

Russell didn’t have a pilot’s license, and authorities say it’s unclear how he attained the skills to do loops in the aircraft before crashing about an hour after taking off into a small island in the Puget Sound.

Authorities say Russell went through various background checks to get clearance to be in the secured area

There was no connection to terrorism, Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the local sheriff’s department, said.

Video showed the Horizon Air Q400 doing large loops and other dangerous manoeuvres as the sun set on Puget Sound. There were no passengers aboard.

Harrowing audio revealed the pilot joking with the controllers who begged him to land the 76-seater Horizon Air Q400 before it nosedived and burst into a fireball 25 miles from takeoff.

He also told them he was a “broken man” and apologised to the air traffic controller, saying: “I hope this doesn’t ruin your day.”

At one point, he said: “Hey do you think if I land this successfully Alaska will give me a job as a pilot?”

Authorities initially said the man was a mechanic, but Alaska Airlines later said he was believed to be a ground service agent employed by Horizon.

Those employees direct aircraft for takeoff and gate approach and de-ice planes. Southers, the aviation security expert, said Russell could have caused mass destruction.

“If he had the skill set to do loops with a plane like this, he certainly had the capacity to fly it into a building and kill people on the ground.,” he said.

The plane was pursued by military aircraft before it crashed on tiny Ketron Island, southwest of Tacoma, Washington. Video showed fiery flames amid trees on the island, which is sparsely populated and only accessible by ferry.

No structures on the ground were damaged, Alaska Airlines said.

Troyer said F-15 aircraft took off out of Portland, Oregon, and were in the air “within a few minutes,” and the pilots kept “people on the ground safe.”

Sheriff’s department officials said they were working to conduct a background investigation on the Pierce County resident.

The aircraft was stolen about 8PM, Alaska Airlines said, and was in a “maintenance position” and not scheduled for a passenger flight.

Horizon Air is part of Alaska Air Group and flies shorter routes throughout the US West. The Q400 is a turboprop aircraft with 76 seats.

Pierce County Sheriff Paul Pastor said Russell “did something foolish and may well have paid with his life.”

Flights out of Sea-Tac, the largest commercial airport in the Pacific Northwest, were temporarily grounded during the drama.

The plane crashed in a heavily wooded area of thick underbrush on the island, according to Debra Eckrote, the Western Pacific regional chief for the National Transportation Safety Board. The crash sparked a 2-acre wildfire.

“It is highly fragmented,” she said of the plane. “The wings are off, the fuselage is, I think, kind of positioned upside down.” The FBI is looking into the man’s background and trying to determine his motive, she said.

Investigators are trying to find how he got on the plane. “He’s ground support so they have access to aircraft,” she said of Russell.

Investigators expect they will be able to recover both the cockpit voice recorder and the event data recorder from the plane.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Saturday morning that President Donald Trump is “monitoring the situation.”

Alaska Air Group CEO Brad Tilden said in a statement early on Saturday morning that the airline was “working to find out everything we possibly can about what happened.”

The airline was co-ordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board, he said.