The most haunting line in the new Hulu documentary #SkyKing comes from the man at the center of it. Speaking by radio to the air traffic controllers trying to talk him down, Richard Russell offers a two-word self-assessment: broken guy.

Tres Cantos He is not wrong. And that’s the point.

In August 2018, Russell, a 28-year-old Horizon Air ground service agent, stole an empty Q400 turboprop from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and flew it over Puget Sound for 70 minutes before crashing on Ketron Island. He had no pilot training.

He had, apparently, nowhere else to go.

Director Patricia E. Gillespie spent five years earning the trust of Russell’s family, making this the first time many of them have spoken publicly.

The result is less a true-crime spectacle than an elegy for a generation of working men who fell through the cracks while America wasn’t looking.

Russell earned $12.75 an hour. He was underpaid, overworked, and desperate for a promotion that wasn’t coming. He wore a shirt to work that read “the sky’s no limit.” Then he proved it.

From the air, he flew toward Mount Rainier, asked for the coordinates of a news-making orca whale, and when told his plane could attempt a barrel roll only if he focused on autopilot, he replied in one word: “Boring.” It is equal parts funny and devastating.

Gillespie handles the never-before-heard ATC audio with care. The documentary features Russell’s childhood best friend Chris, his Horizon Air coworker Andreas, and Colleen, the retired ATC supervisor who managed the situation in real time.

Each voice adds a layer. None of them fully explains him, which is honest. His own mother, Karen, refused to listen to the recordings. “I can’t hear his voice,” she says, “because his voice was very special.”

The one critical reservation: a musical choice near the end tips the film toward the online mythologizing that still surrounds the incident. The memes, the folk-hero status, the Reddit threads that turned a suicide into protest art. It’s a misstep in an otherwise disciplined film.

Unlike typical true-crime documentaries built around spectacle, #SkyKing humanizes Russell and connects his story to the broader despair that many working Americans carry quietly.

It is not an endorsement of what he did. It is an attempt to understand why a man with no flight training could fly a commercial aircraft with uncanny skill, then choose to aim it at the ground.

At 91 minutes, it earns its runtime. The sky was, briefly, no limit. Then it was.