She isn't "returning" the plane, she's landing it somewhere and he's finding out it's there later. And she isn't "fixing" it, she's replacing bits (the battery and headphones) he removed to make it harder to steal.
> As Hong would come to find out, the colorful aircraft had been flown across Southern California by an unknown pilot, unnoticed, in a series of joyrides — or joy flights — at least twice before and then simply returned to the airport.
But don’t all pilots have to lodge their flight plans? Surely hiding a plane in a hangar is not that easy since you would know which airport it is located in.
> But don’t all pilots have to lodge their flight plans?
No, they don't. And many municipal airports aren't even manned and, outside of certain areas, aren't under direct air traffic control. I flew in a Cessna with a private pilot who landed at a municipal airport in Los Angeles Country without ever talking to anyone. He just announced his intention to land on the published radio frequency, received no objection (because no one else was around), visually confirmed the runway was clear with a flyby, then lined up on the approach path and landed. I got the sense this is the norm in civil aviation outside of major airports.
While until recently I had to, in the name of flight safety, carefully pack my bags while consulting the sizes of shampoo containers allowed in the carry-on baggage, surrender my unapproved nail clippers, and with my shoes in hand and pants belt-less - stand in line to be x-rayed and patted down on my way to board a plane…
… someone can without anyone ringing any alarm bells and not phasing the local law enforcement one bit - take off multiple times unnoticed and unidentified on a private plane, and, if they choose to, fly it straight into a freshly refueled jet that I am sitting in waiting to take off.
Shhh, hope “terrorists” don’t read this comment. Or the article in LA Times.
Well, yeah. Anyone can own a small plane if they have the money. There’s plenty of uncontrolled airspace and uncontrolled airports.
Good God! What would happen if someone rented a box truck and bought some fertilizer?
Oh, and civilians can own muzzle-loading black powder cannons. Imagine what someone could do with a 32-pound cannonball.
The reality is anyone with the proper skills can crash a plane into anything they like. Unless you have someone on the roof with a MPAD, no one is going be to stop them in time.
General aviation, in the U.S. at least, runs largely on the honor system. To fly in controlled airspace these days, ADS-B out is required, and there are definitely records of where people go
There is a big difference between a Cessna 172 with a gross weight of 2,450 including the 56 gallons of fuel and an A380 with a maximum takeoff weight of 1,268,000 pounds and 65,000 gallons of fuel.
Except they assumed that it'd be a 707 and also that'd be at landing speed of about 180mph ... not a 767 (which could be as much as 2x a 707 in take off weight) doing almost 600 mph.
Also also. "no alarm bells" is highly dependent on location. If this "stolen" plane were to have flown into highly controlled airspace without approvals, you can bet your ass that alarm bells would have gone off. But the person flying the plane knew what they were doing and where they were going. They went away from busy areas and didn't anything out of the ordinary.
Is there still many reasons this could be a problem? Sure. But invoking the terrorism word is full FUD, the likes of which the media loves to use. And ends us with security theater like shampoo size limits.
This is rather hysterical. "Alarm bells" - both metaphorical and physical - would absolutely be going off if a Cessna was not responding on radio and headed anywhere near an airport operating passenger jets. Corona Muni isn't LAX.
To be fair, few people know anything about aviation other than being miffed at the grand inconvenience of obeying the rules of scheduled passenger flight services.
To be accurate I am “miffed” at the blasé response of airport admin and local police. No “criminal negligence”, no “dereliction of duty”. Not even administrative punishment for utter incompetence at a primary job with rather serious potential consequences.
...which betrays a lack of knowledge of aviation beyond the inconveniences of scheduled passenger flight services.
There is an entire world of aviation outside of commercial airlines flying airliners out of large, towered airports with fancy terminal buildings. An aircraft is a vehicle like any other, and operating one is regulated in tiers like any other type of vehicle. It's about as inane to gripe that an untowered recreational airport is not regulated to the same extent as the airports you fly commercially out of, as it would be to gripe that you driving your car out of your home is not regulated to the same extent as driving a school bus.
I imagine it's someone that doesn't have the monetary means to rent or buy a plane combined with a bit of mental health issues.
At the uncontrolled community airport I got my PPL at there were a few pilots who were known to have expired medical certificates and long expired flight reviews flying planes that they owned that hadn't had an annual inspection in years. All older guys who had nothing to lose if the FAA found out and grounded them.
I'm not sure why the owner of that aircraft doesn't setup an alert for it's tail number on one of the many aviation tracking sites. Call the airport management, police or local FBO once he sees it on approach to land at some airport.
> All older guys who had nothing to lose if the FAA found out and grounded them.
If you're someone that has enough land to make a strip and can afford the plane, you'd be amazed at what you can "get away" with out the anyone of authority noticing.
I've been to my friend's friend's bachelor pad, and that guy takes off and lands in his yard, maybe 200 feet long on a decent slope. At least he is an airline pilot and has a license.
Some smaller airports are pretty sleepy. There's no control tower at his home airport (Corona Municipal Airport) and it doesn't look like there's an FBO there. There's probably generally no one at the airport unless someone is there to take their plane up. Even if there is someone there running out to the ramp every time they hear a plane startup would get tedious very quickly.
There are even just 'airfields' here, if that's even the proper name. They're just well maintained grass fields with a place to tie up a plane and refueling.
Maybe that's too far in a rural area for this conversation though.
Strong gusts can move an unsecured plane, and damage its wings, tail, or propellars. Properly securing the plane prevents it from rocking or tilting in a manner that might do those things.
> I'm leaning towards it being some extremely cheeky DCS/flightsim nerd because of the shortness and randomness of the flights. It screams "do it because I can and report back to the boys" to me.
It's not so easy to land a plane in real life, even if you have a lot of flightsim experience. It is definitely possible and there are people who have done it, but I don't think it's the norm. A lot of flying, especially landing, involves sensory inputs. Additionally, replacing the battery in that Cessna probably requires taking the cowling off. Not properly securing the battery or cowling may result in a bad time if something comes loose. Once again, doable, but you can do as quickly as you can with a car.
> I know literally nothing about flying. How does this work? Wouldn't the air traffic controllers see it on radar and try to radio it then call in the military (I've probably watched too many movies.)? Always blows my mind when I hear this kind of stuff in this day and age.
If you takeoff from an uncontrolled airport and stay clear of controlled and restricted airspace you don't have to say a single thing on any radio and no one will care about you. The controllers would see the blip on their radars but there's no requirements to check in with them (although it's generally a good idea) so they'll mostly keep other aircraft who they are talking to away from you.
Now, if you do fly into controlled airspace near an airport with a tower without talking to anyone, things will change. A slight excursion into the controlled airspace for a short time may go unnoticed, but the more blatant and prolonged the deviation, the larger the response will be. Fly into LAX's airspace and get in the way of their flights and you'll eventually get a visit from some friendly fighter jets. (There are some exceptions. For instance, there's a few narrow corridors through LAX's airspace that don't require talking to ATC. One of those corridors even goes directly over LAX's runways at a few thousand feet.)
> It's not so easy to land a plane in real life, even if you have a lot of flightsim experience.
I dunno where I'd put it on the difficulty scale of things, but with lots of flight sim experience, it seems you're a lot better equipped than others. I've landed a Cessna, and I'm not a pilot, just eager enthusiast with some flight sim experience over many years. The person co-piloting/supervising told me I did great, and that he only allowed me to land the plane because I demonstrated proficiency in the air. I wouldn't say it's "hard", probably I'd have more trouble with finding and replacing the battery than the actual flying part.
Consider that you did so with an actual pilot beside you in what I presume were CAVOK conditions.
Plenty of children (once they get big enough to reach the pedals) can take a car for a spin. That doesn't mean that driving safely in all conditions you may find yourself thrown in is easy, even with e.g. lots of racing game experience.
I, too, landed whatever tailwheel my grandpa had back when I was eight years old, without even an hour of training. Now, my kids can land my plane too. It helps that I'm on the controls, but they don't seem to notice. I hope my grandpa enjoyed it then as much as I do now.
The suggestion that proficiency "in the air" correlates to ability to land, and the referring to the PIC as "co-piloting" are both pretty good indicators that there's more to the story. Flying is fun, but doing so without training is terribly unforgiving.
> For instance, there's a few narrow corridors through LAX's airspace that don't require talking to ATC. One of those corridors even goes directly over LAX's runways at a few thousand feet.)
Most aircraft have a GPS on the panel that can show you the airspace around you and along your flight path, but it's not a required instrument. It's more of a 2D depiction of the airspaces, but there are three dimensional depictions on them. There's also apps like ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot that you can run on a tablet or phone.
Before those electronic methods became ubiquitous pilots used paper charts and references and used ground references, pilotage and navigation aids to determine their position on that paper map. For instance, here's the complex airspace around the aircraft owner's home airport. https://skyvector.com/?ll=33.897663018511054,-117.6024627647...
It didn’t roll off the factory floor in 1958 with a moving map GPS. A common retrofit is a Garmin 430 that has a 2D bird’s eye view of airspace lateral boundaries. ForeFlight runs on iPhones and iPads; other electronic flight bag software runs on either iOS or Android devices. But you have to know what you’re looking at and what the rules are for different classes of airspace. In Class C or D, you only have to establish two-way contact, but Class B requires explicit clearance.
As a flight instructor, flight sim teaches lots of bad habits that need to be unlearned at the beginning. Over-fixation on instruments is at the top of this list for VFR operations. I am not at all convinced that a person with only sim experience would be able to successfully land a C172.
I wasn't even able to successfully land a 172 after 6 or 8 hours in a 150 and growing up around aviation, including flight sims. Add in the fact that these were night flights (and in SoCal airspace) and I become very skeptical of the flightsim theory. I only wonder what tail number the time builder logged (but if you're going to forge that, or the airports, why do the flight at all?)
I have zero experience with simracing, so I don’t know. I would guess the urgency of other vehicles being around, needing to see the course, and a lack of interesting instruments inside would tend to keep a simracer’s eyes outside and away from the dash.
Yes, VFR pilots need to look outside a huge majority of the time. The rule of thumb is look out the window 90% of the time and peek at your instruments the remaining 10 percent. New primary students and especially simmers have a tendency to stare at the flight instruments, a bad habit that can be tough to break.
For example, ATC might give an altitude restriction for safety: “Cessna 123AB, maintain VFR at or below three thousand for crossing traffic.” Observing this restriction is important, but staring at the altimeter will likely result in the heading wandering all over the place and ironically even a tendency to over-control altitude that may cause wandering up and down. The proper way to execute it is to learn what the level sight picture looks like, put the nose there, trim for straight-and-level flight, and occasionally peek at the altimeter and VSI to confirm that it’s staying there. If the pilot gets distracted, say looking down at an iPad for a bit, look outside first to get back on heading if necessary, check the instruments (“take a picture with your mind”), and make small adjustments to get back to where it should be.
ATC operates on lots of buffers. For a restriction of three thousand, that crossing traffic is likely to be at 4,000 or higher.
Ah that makes quite a lot of sense and I'd definitely find myself with that bad habit if I tried flying. In a sim my purpose is to have fun flying the plane by the seat of my pants but flying in reality would have me anxious to avoid breaking any rules.
No need to anxious. Your CFI is there to keep you safe and prevent anything wildly dangerous while you’re teaching yourself to fly.
Look outside, and learn what correct looks like. References on the ground are already giving you gobs of information. The feel of the yoke and the sounds from the engine are also giving you continuous clues about what the airplane is doing. No sim I’ve seen reproduces all of those additional channels of information.
Where simulators are really helpful is with procedural flying, like practicing instrument approaches. You can’t log your desktop sim for currency, but advanced training devices are good enough in the FAA’s eyes.
I am starting lessons here at EMT next week. My instructor's partner saw someone messing with this plane today. she drove up on the line to see if they needed help. she didnt know who they were. Her partner got a pic of the plane. Funny thing is my instructor is about my age.. so she kinda fit the desc. Now she's prefacing this news with, Im not her! lol Funny and madd3ning.
Not sure if I missed this in the story, but the second incident started with the owner removing the battery. It was replaced by the joyrider. Here's what I don't get. Presumably the incident happened in the middle of the night? Did the joyrider carry an extra battery? Or did they take notes, purchase a battery the next day, and install it that night?
> But Montanez said there’s no immediate indication as to who the culprit is.
My understanding was you cannot fly without filing a flight plan (or is this just a Canada-specific thing?), and that flight plan has to be submitted by someone, so there has to be a trail here. If the plans were not filed, after all, how would he be able to tell the plane was flown "multiple times" during one of this extended absences?
Flight plans are only required for IFR flights in many countries. The VFR rules vary (altitude, area, etc). You can file a VFR flight plan if you want to but it is not required.
On the other hand you can't enter Clasa B airspace (the airspace around large airports) without permission from ATC. You also can't fly above 18,000ft in the US under VFR. That keeps small planes mostly away from the big jets.
For VFR (visual flight rules) flights in the U.S., a flight plan is not needed and many such flights are made without a flight plan. If a VFR flight is conducted without talking to anyone, to and from uncontrolled fields, then they would be squawking 1200, in which case the flight wouldn't be identified on Flight Aware. Unless there's some unique ID being transmitted by ADS-B...
I have a great story from my friend's father when we were kids in the western US. They lived at one of these residential airstrip developments, and owned a remote ranch about 60 min. away by air. The father was in the habit of commuting between his home and ranch at will.
Flying home one day he found himself flanked by two fighter jets and escorted to the nearest commercial airport. He was hustled into the back of a black SUV and taken to his home where is family was gathered in the living room giving statements to a bunch of men in suits. Turns out the POTUS was is town for a visit, and my friends father had failed to read the temporary flight restriction advisory..
Yes, there has to be a trail, but not from flight plans.
In the U.S., ATC does not receive VFR flight plans (except for the weird special case of the D.C. SFRA, but even those are filed as IFR flight plans), only Search and Rescue. Flying in instrument conditions requires being on an IFR flight plan.
Interestingly, airplanes can also get repossessed. Special pilots get all the legal paperwork arranged and just show up and fly a plane out.
I suppose the high skill needed means that most pilots wouldn't want to steal airplanes, and it would not make sense to steal any airplane that needs special support from the manufacturer (the new owner can't keep it flying). Cars are much lower skill to steal and maintain and have a much broader market.
From what I've been told by fixed wing pilots, flying a plane isn't really that hard. At least one baggage handler stole a commercial passenger aircraft recently and flew it out, including acrobatics.
Flying one in a safe manner and following all the rules can be pretty difficult however. For example there is an area near me that is from the air as boring as any other part of Texas. It's controlled airspace because it is the Bush Family Ranch. The secret service will investigate you if you fly over it.
Flying is easy to those for whom it's become second nature. At first it's really very difficult to get the plane to do (and keep doing) what you want (or what ATC instructs). At some point, you realize that you're holding a heading and altitude without really thinking about it, while doing a several other things. I think it really depends on who you ask and a whole host of other variables just how easy flying is.
2. Knowing what to do when things go wrong. Any time you read about jets avoiding near collisions, landing in heavy crosswinds, landing safely after engine failure, etc etc, you have many checklists and years of rigorous training to thank for that.
Landing is tough because it’s somewhat counterintuitive. You need to maintain enough airspeed to avoid a stall but obviously you need to slow down to lose altitude and, you know, stop.
Never got far past my PPL decades ago (less than 100 hours total iirc) but landing was always such a fun dance in Pipers and Cessnas, slipping the plane into the cross-wind to line up the plane at the last moment before touching done.
Yeah. I've been in an A320 simulator before for a few hours. They are pretty easy to fly and land. What isn't easy is getting one in a state ready to fly and to the runway. I can fly a Cessna 172 (didn't get enough solo hours for PPL though) and it's not difficult. Again prep is the hardest bit.
Oh yeah for larger jet aircraft certainly it is. I read that apparently the SR-71 preflight was so big it was performed by a backup crew and the primary crew had the option to simply jump in and fly if the timetable required it. But a small single engine aircraft isn't nearly as bad
Pretty much my first thought as well. I'd probably setup some kind of lo-jack + dashcam setup to try and get images of the "burrowing" person(s) though.
You'd think maybe the DEA, ATF, FBI and/or FAA would find enough interest in this to operate some level of sting operation or crack down.
Keep in mind that this isn't really equivalent, cost-wise, to the crime of taking a car for a joyride -- airplane engines have rigorous maintenance schedules that require expensive overhauls, and aviation gasoline looks to be over double the price of "car" gasoline (and the MPG for that Cessna is probably half that of a decent car).
Edit: also this version of the biscuit story is missing the final extra flavor text! The version I read ended something like, “What I love about this tragedy is that there is another bloke who has been telling the exact same story about an insane person stealing their biscuits. Except his version does not end on the punchline.”
Very bizarre. To fly a plane out, won't the pilot of the plane have to speak with ATC? I wonder if letting the ATC (of the municipal airport) be informed that this plane tends to be flown by someone who might not be authorized might help?
Unless you're inside a place with special flight rules (like the Washington DC area), you can just fly your plane whenever you want and don't have to file a flight plan or tell anyone. Small airports often don't have ATC so all communications are on a single frequency that all pilots trying to take off or land are tuned into. It's like being at a four way stop sign, there's "right of way" protocol to follow so you don't need to do much other than just announce your intentions to anyone that cares to hear them.
Really the only way to handle this is to put your plane in a locked hanger or chain it to the ground with a lock and then pay for whatever flight tracker that will alert you whenever a specific tail number is in the air. Follow it and then call whatever local police when it lands.
It depends on the airport! Some smaller airports (like Corona Municipal Airport where the story is based) - are untowered, meaning that there's no central ATC to chat with when taking off/landing - everyone announces what they're doing as they're doing it and there's a traffic pattern/flow that everyone follows to ensure there's no conflicts - it works surprisingly well.
In the US, you can get shockingly very far without having to chat with ATC.
There's no "requirement" that pilots announce their intentions on the common frequency at uncontrolled airports, some aircraft may not even have radios.
> no "requirement" that pilots announce their intentions on the common frequency at uncontrolled airports, some aircraft may not even have radios
Got to love it when a Citation whose pilot is to arrogant to radio and a crop duster that doesn’t have any instruments to speak of are both in the pattern.
> circle well above the airport and watch the chaos below
Having been cut off by that particular pilot once in the pattern and once when I was holding short, I’m absolutely there for everyone on CTAF absolutely tearing them apart for a straight two minutes until someone from UNICOM tells the Vietnam vets in their hangars to shut the fuck up. (Eastern Idaho. Uncontrolled.)
The article said the airplane is based at KAJO, which is barely within the lateral boundary of Ontario International’s Class C shelf. To legally avoid a requirement to talk to ATC going north, he would have to stay below 2,700 MSL and remain outside the KONT Class C core. There’s a lot of area to the south and east that a pilot could buzz around without having to talk to anyone. Avoiding terrain to the south would be important.
Plenty of airports do not have controlled airspace. I've been to at least one where the local frequency was played on a loudspeaker on the ground so that people on the runway knew when a plane was coming in for a landing. The pilot still should communicate what they are doing, but they don't need approval to land.
The article says that he found cigarette butts in the airplane. This DNA evidence would make it straightforward for the police to find the culprit if they wanted to.
Possessing someone's DNA doesn't automatically, magically tell you who they are. If there's nothing to match it to then all you have is someone's spit.
My cars been stolen twice and both times, given the type of car, where it was stolen, and where it was abandoned the cops said it was most likely stolen to conduct a drug deal and then ditched
Seems plausible that something like that may be going on here
It's probably just that new startup, Aero. It's like Turo, except airplanes instead of cars. Also, they don't tell the airplane owners.
But seriously, there are lots of airplanes sitting on ramps for months at a time with no security so it's a minor miracle it doesn't happen more often.
So a perfectly good plane that someone could enjoy and fly sits languishing at an airport because the owner, who now can't fly or doesn't want to, won't sell it? I get the attachment and all. However, if you know there's a finite number of these things then please sell it to someone who would use it.
That's a golden age plane and it should be flown. Too bad many people would rather let something rot.
> because the owner, who now can't fly or doesn't want to, won't sell it
It’s an airworthy 1958 Cessna for a reason. Planes like these don’t depreciate like cars, by time, but like engines: flight time is the principal determiner of deterioration. (For pressurised planes its pressure cycles.) The only thing being “wasted” here might be hangar space.
She isn't "returning" the plane, she's landing it somewhere and he's finding out it's there later. And she isn't "fixing" it, she's replacing bits (the battery and headphones) he removed to make it harder to steal.
> she isn't "fixing" it
The idea of a rando doing unknown maintenance on my plane is downright horrifying.
suck it up, pal, I just repacked your wheel bearings
Apparently she sometimes returned the plane?
> As Hong would come to find out, the colorful aircraft had been flown across Southern California by an unknown pilot, unnoticed, in a series of joyrides — or joy flights — at least twice before and then simply returned to the airport.
That was my first thought. There's only so many places you can take it. Though I guess they could also ... hide it in a hangar somewhere?
It's fairly easy to change a 12V battery, and is covered under elementary maintenance (the owner can do it themselves).
But don’t all pilots have to lodge their flight plans? Surely hiding a plane in a hangar is not that easy since you would know which airport it is located in.
> But don’t all pilots have to lodge their flight plans?
No, they don't. And many municipal airports aren't even manned and, outside of certain areas, aren't under direct air traffic control. I flew in a Cessna with a private pilot who landed at a municipal airport in Los Angeles Country without ever talking to anyone. He just announced his intention to land on the published radio frequency, received no objection (because no one else was around), visually confirmed the runway was clear with a flyby, then lined up on the approach path and landed. I got the sense this is the norm in civil aviation outside of major airports.
Yeah I’ve had the same experience several times with a private pilot I knew. There’s a procedure for it in the pilot’s handbook.
No. Many flight types do not require flight plans.
https://www.ecfr.gov/search?search%5Bdate%5D=current&search%...
Or browse by Title 14, Chapter 1, Subchapters F & G (Aka Title 14, Parts 89 - 139)
I'm not vouching for this link in particular, but you can also search for things like Part 91 operator, Part 135 operator, etc
https://l33jets.com/resources/blog/the-difference-between-pa...
While until recently I had to, in the name of flight safety, carefully pack my bags while consulting the sizes of shampoo containers allowed in the carry-on baggage, surrender my unapproved nail clippers, and with my shoes in hand and pants belt-less - stand in line to be x-rayed and patted down on my way to board a plane…
… someone can without anyone ringing any alarm bells and not phasing the local law enforcement one bit - take off multiple times unnoticed and unidentified on a private plane, and, if they choose to, fly it straight into a freshly refueled jet that I am sitting in waiting to take off.
Shhh, hope “terrorists” don’t read this comment. Or the article in LA Times.
Well, yeah. Anyone can own a small plane if they have the money. There’s plenty of uncontrolled airspace and uncontrolled airports.
Good God! What would happen if someone rented a box truck and bought some fertilizer?
Oh, and civilians can own muzzle-loading black powder cannons. Imagine what someone could do with a 32-pound cannonball.
The reality is anyone with the proper skills can crash a plane into anything they like. Unless you have someone on the roof with a MPAD, no one is going be to stop them in time.
> Oh, and civilians can own muzzle-loading black powder cannons. Imagine what someone could do with a 32-pound cannonball.
At many historical locations, said cannons are just sitting around entirely unguarded! Anyone[0] could just come and take one.
[0]...equipped with heavy equipment and maybe a hefty grinder or a stout set of bolt cutters.
They could steal a smaller cannon first and use that on any chains or locks.
They're all plugged with concrete
Concrete plug, steel barrel.
Easily remedied!
*in the name of security theater
General aviation, in the U.S. at least, runs largely on the honor system. To fly in controlled airspace these days, ADS-B out is required, and there are definitely records of where people go
There is a big difference between a Cessna 172 with a gross weight of 2,450 including the 56 gallons of fuel and an A380 with a maximum takeoff weight of 1,268,000 pounds and 65,000 gallons of fuel.
Did you know the Twin Towers were actually designed to withstand a jet? https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19930227/1687698/tw...
Except they assumed that it'd be a 707 and also that'd be at landing speed of about 180mph ... not a 767 (which could be as much as 2x a 707 in take off weight) doing almost 600 mph.
A plane larger than a Cessna, but still no jumbo jet, crashed into a mall https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2010/12/21/the-sunvalley-mall-p... - 7 people died. Tragic, but it goes to show that SIZE DOES MATTER.
Also also. "no alarm bells" is highly dependent on location. If this "stolen" plane were to have flown into highly controlled airspace without approvals, you can bet your ass that alarm bells would have gone off. But the person flying the plane knew what they were doing and where they were going. They went away from busy areas and didn't anything out of the ordinary.
Is there still many reasons this could be a problem? Sure. But invoking the terrorism word is full FUD, the likes of which the media loves to use. And ends us with security theater like shampoo size limits.
This is rather hysterical. "Alarm bells" - both metaphorical and physical - would absolutely be going off if a Cessna was not responding on radio and headed anywhere near an airport operating passenger jets. Corona Muni isn't LAX.
To be fair, few people know anything about aviation other than being miffed at the grand inconvenience of obeying the rules of scheduled passenger flight services.
To be accurate I am “miffed” at the blasé response of airport admin and local police. No “criminal negligence”, no “dereliction of duty”. Not even administrative punishment for utter incompetence at a primary job with rather serious potential consequences.
Isn't this a bit like being mad at Joe's Unstaffed Parking Garage because someone "borrowed" your car that you left there for the week?
That’s basically the right analogy.
...which betrays a lack of knowledge of aviation beyond the inconveniences of scheduled passenger flight services.
There is an entire world of aviation outside of commercial airlines flying airliners out of large, towered airports with fancy terminal buildings. An aircraft is a vehicle like any other, and operating one is regulated in tiers like any other type of vehicle. It's about as inane to gripe that an untowered recreational airport is not regulated to the same extent as the airports you fly commercially out of, as it would be to gripe that you driving your car out of your home is not regulated to the same extent as driving a school bus.
Or, to make the point more salient, a rowboat in a lake, vs a containership in a deep water port.
I imagine it's someone that doesn't have the monetary means to rent or buy a plane combined with a bit of mental health issues.
At the uncontrolled community airport I got my PPL at there were a few pilots who were known to have expired medical certificates and long expired flight reviews flying planes that they owned that hadn't had an annual inspection in years. All older guys who had nothing to lose if the FAA found out and grounded them.
I'm not sure why the owner of that aircraft doesn't setup an alert for it's tail number on one of the many aviation tracking sites. Call the airport management, police or local FBO once he sees it on approach to land at some airport.
> All older guys who had nothing to lose if the FAA found out and grounded them.
If you're someone that has enough land to make a strip and can afford the plane, you'd be amazed at what you can "get away" with out the anyone of authority noticing.
I've been to my friend's friend's bachelor pad, and that guy takes off and lands in his yard, maybe 200 feet long on a decent slope. At least he is an airline pilot and has a license.
OK he's living the life
He’s 75, he may not know those sites are an option.
That said how is the airport not doing something about this? They just keep letting it happen?
Some smaller airports are pretty sleepy. There's no control tower at his home airport (Corona Municipal Airport) and it doesn't look like there's an FBO there. There's probably generally no one at the airport unless someone is there to take their plane up. Even if there is someone there running out to the ramp every time they hear a plane startup would get tedious very quickly.
There are even just 'airfields' here, if that's even the proper name. They're just well maintained grass fields with a place to tie up a plane and refueling.
Maybe that's too far in a rural area for this conversation though.
Why would we need to tie up a plane? Would they fly away otherwise?
Strong gusts can move an unsecured plane, and damage its wings, tail, or propellars. Properly securing the plane prevents it from rocking or tilting in a manner that might do those things.
Yes, they can!
They literally mention FlightAware and him using it in the article.
He knows the website exists, does he know he can put an alert on for his plane?
I'm leaning towards it being some extremely cheeky DCS/flightsim nerd because of the shortness and randomness of the flights.
> I'm leaning towards it being some extremely cheeky DCS/flightsim nerd because of the shortness and randomness of the flights. It screams "do it because I can and report back to the boys" to me.
It's not so easy to land a plane in real life, even if you have a lot of flightsim experience. It is definitely possible and there are people who have done it, but I don't think it's the norm. A lot of flying, especially landing, involves sensory inputs. Additionally, replacing the battery in that Cessna probably requires taking the cowling off. Not properly securing the battery or cowling may result in a bad time if something comes loose. Once again, doable, but you can do as quickly as you can with a car.
> I know literally nothing about flying. How does this work? Wouldn't the air traffic controllers see it on radar and try to radio it then call in the military (I've probably watched too many movies.)? Always blows my mind when I hear this kind of stuff in this day and age.
If you takeoff from an uncontrolled airport and stay clear of controlled and restricted airspace you don't have to say a single thing on any radio and no one will care about you. The controllers would see the blip on their radars but there's no requirements to check in with them (although it's generally a good idea) so they'll mostly keep other aircraft who they are talking to away from you.
Now, if you do fly into controlled airspace near an airport with a tower without talking to anyone, things will change. A slight excursion into the controlled airspace for a short time may go unnoticed, but the more blatant and prolonged the deviation, the larger the response will be. Fly into LAX's airspace and get in the way of their flights and you'll eventually get a visit from some friendly fighter jets. (There are some exceptions. For instance, there's a few narrow corridors through LAX's airspace that don't require talking to ATC. One of those corridors even goes directly over LAX's runways at a few thousand feet.)
> It's not so easy to land a plane in real life, even if you have a lot of flightsim experience.
I dunno where I'd put it on the difficulty scale of things, but with lots of flight sim experience, it seems you're a lot better equipped than others. I've landed a Cessna, and I'm not a pilot, just eager enthusiast with some flight sim experience over many years. The person co-piloting/supervising told me I did great, and that he only allowed me to land the plane because I demonstrated proficiency in the air. I wouldn't say it's "hard", probably I'd have more trouble with finding and replacing the battery than the actual flying part.
Consider that you did so with an actual pilot beside you in what I presume were CAVOK conditions.
Plenty of children (once they get big enough to reach the pedals) can take a car for a spin. That doesn't mean that driving safely in all conditions you may find yourself thrown in is easy, even with e.g. lots of racing game experience.
I, too, landed whatever tailwheel my grandpa had back when I was eight years old, without even an hour of training. Now, my kids can land my plane too. It helps that I'm on the controls, but they don't seem to notice. I hope my grandpa enjoyed it then as much as I do now.
The suggestion that proficiency "in the air" correlates to ability to land, and the referring to the PIC as "co-piloting" are both pretty good indicators that there's more to the story. Flying is fun, but doing so without training is terribly unforgiving.
> For instance, there's a few narrow corridors through LAX's airspace that don't require talking to ATC. One of those corridors even goes directly over LAX's runways at a few thousand feet.)
Why do these exist?
Same reason crosswalks for pedestrians exist on roads.
Because they are safe to use, and there is no real reason for them not to exist.
Fascinating. Are there instruments that show you in realtime 3d airspaces you can enter and not?
Most aircraft have a GPS on the panel that can show you the airspace around you and along your flight path, but it's not a required instrument. It's more of a 2D depiction of the airspaces, but there are three dimensional depictions on them. There's also apps like ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot that you can run on a tablet or phone.
Before those electronic methods became ubiquitous pilots used paper charts and references and used ground references, pilotage and navigation aids to determine their position on that paper map. For instance, here's the complex airspace around the aircraft owner's home airport. https://skyvector.com/?ll=33.897663018511054,-117.6024627647...
It didn’t roll off the factory floor in 1958 with a moving map GPS. A common retrofit is a Garmin 430 that has a 2D bird’s eye view of airspace lateral boundaries. ForeFlight runs on iPhones and iPads; other electronic flight bag software runs on either iOS or Android devices. But you have to know what you’re looking at and what the rules are for different classes of airspace. In Class C or D, you only have to establish two-way contact, but Class B requires explicit clearance.
As a flight instructor, flight sim teaches lots of bad habits that need to be unlearned at the beginning. Over-fixation on instruments is at the top of this list for VFR operations. I am not at all convinced that a person with only sim experience would be able to successfully land a C172.
I wasn't even able to successfully land a 172 after 6 or 8 hours in a 150 and growing up around aviation, including flight sims. Add in the fact that these were night flights (and in SoCal airspace) and I become very skeptical of the flightsim theory. I only wonder what tail number the time builder logged (but if you're going to forge that, or the airports, why do the flight at all?)
How similar would you say it is to simracing? Because simracing prepped me extremely well for the track despite never having driven a car.
I have zero experience with simracing, so I don’t know. I would guess the urgency of other vehicles being around, needing to see the course, and a lack of interesting instruments inside would tend to keep a simracer’s eyes outside and away from the dash.
Flight sim experience causes "over-fixation on instruments"? I'm surprised, I would have expected the opposite.
Yes, VFR pilots need to look outside a huge majority of the time. The rule of thumb is look out the window 90% of the time and peek at your instruments the remaining 10 percent. New primary students and especially simmers have a tendency to stare at the flight instruments, a bad habit that can be tough to break.
For example, ATC might give an altitude restriction for safety: “Cessna 123AB, maintain VFR at or below three thousand for crossing traffic.” Observing this restriction is important, but staring at the altimeter will likely result in the heading wandering all over the place and ironically even a tendency to over-control altitude that may cause wandering up and down. The proper way to execute it is to learn what the level sight picture looks like, put the nose there, trim for straight-and-level flight, and occasionally peek at the altimeter and VSI to confirm that it’s staying there. If the pilot gets distracted, say looking down at an iPad for a bit, look outside first to get back on heading if necessary, check the instruments (“take a picture with your mind”), and make small adjustments to get back to where it should be.
ATC operates on lots of buffers. For a restriction of three thousand, that crossing traffic is likely to be at 4,000 or higher.
Ah that makes quite a lot of sense and I'd definitely find myself with that bad habit if I tried flying. In a sim my purpose is to have fun flying the plane by the seat of my pants but flying in reality would have me anxious to avoid breaking any rules.
No need to anxious. Your CFI is there to keep you safe and prevent anything wildly dangerous while you’re teaching yourself to fly.
Look outside, and learn what correct looks like. References on the ground are already giving you gobs of information. The feel of the yoke and the sounds from the engine are also giving you continuous clues about what the airplane is doing. No sim I’ve seen reproduces all of those additional channels of information.
Where simulators are really helpful is with procedural flying, like practicing instrument approaches. You can’t log your desktop sim for currency, but advanced training devices are good enough in the FAA’s eyes.
> flying in reality would have me anxious to avoid breaking any rules
You’re generally operating well away from a perilous state with ample margins of safety. I find flying incredibly relaxing.
I'd wager it's the ghost of Sky King, may he forever rest in peace.
https://people.howstuffworks.com/richard-russell.htm
I am starting lessons here at EMT next week. My instructor's partner saw someone messing with this plane today. she drove up on the line to see if they needed help. she didnt know who they were. Her partner got a pic of the plane. Funny thing is my instructor is about my age.. so she kinda fit the desc. Now she's prefacing this news with, Im not her! lol Funny and madd3ning.
Not sure if I missed this in the story, but the second incident started with the owner removing the battery. It was replaced by the joyrider. Here's what I don't get. Presumably the incident happened in the middle of the night? Did the joyrider carry an extra battery? Or did they take notes, purchase a battery the next day, and install it that night?
> But Montanez said there’s no immediate indication as to who the culprit is.
My understanding was you cannot fly without filing a flight plan (or is this just a Canada-specific thing?), and that flight plan has to be submitted by someone, so there has to be a trail here. If the plans were not filed, after all, how would he be able to tell the plane was flown "multiple times" during one of this extended absences?
EDIT: Yes it's Canada-specific, required for any flights over 25 nautical miles, including VFR https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/sor-96-433/p...
Flight plans are only required for IFR flights in many countries. The VFR rules vary (altitude, area, etc). You can file a VFR flight plan if you want to but it is not required.
On the other hand you can't enter Clasa B airspace (the airspace around large airports) without permission from ATC. You also can't fly above 18,000ft in the US under VFR. That keeps small planes mostly away from the big jets.
For VFR (visual flight rules) flights in the U.S., a flight plan is not needed and many such flights are made without a flight plan. If a VFR flight is conducted without talking to anyone, to and from uncontrolled fields, then they would be squawking 1200, in which case the flight wouldn't be identified on Flight Aware. Unless there's some unique ID being transmitted by ADS-B...
I have a great story from my friend's father when we were kids in the western US. They lived at one of these residential airstrip developments, and owned a remote ranch about 60 min. away by air. The father was in the habit of commuting between his home and ranch at will.
Flying home one day he found himself flanked by two fighter jets and escorted to the nearest commercial airport. He was hustled into the back of a black SUV and taken to his home where is family was gathered in the living room giving statements to a bunch of men in suits. Turns out the POTUS was is town for a visit, and my friends father had failed to read the temporary flight restriction advisory..
> they would be squawking 1200, in which case the flight wouldn't be identified on Flight Aware
My 1200 flights frequently show up on FlightAware, FYI.
Yes, there has to be a trail, but not from flight plans.
In the U.S., ATC does not receive VFR flight plans (except for the weird special case of the D.C. SFRA, but even those are filed as IFR flight plans), only Search and Rescue. Flying in instrument conditions requires being on an IFR flight plan.
VFR (visual) flights don’t require filing a flight plan.
Related article: https://www.jalopnik.com/1932213/cessna-172-plane-stolen-twi...
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Interestingly, airplanes can also get repossessed. Special pilots get all the legal paperwork arranged and just show up and fly a plane out.
I suppose the high skill needed means that most pilots wouldn't want to steal airplanes, and it would not make sense to steal any airplane that needs special support from the manufacturer (the new owner can't keep it flying). Cars are much lower skill to steal and maintain and have a much broader market.
https://aerocorner.com/blog/what-happened-to-airplane-repo/
From what I've been told by fixed wing pilots, flying a plane isn't really that hard. At least one baggage handler stole a commercial passenger aircraft recently and flew it out, including acrobatics.
Flying one in a safe manner and following all the rules can be pretty difficult however. For example there is an area near me that is from the air as boring as any other part of Texas. It's controlled airspace because it is the Bush Family Ranch. The secret service will investigate you if you fly over it.
Landing the airplane in a way that you don't damage the airplane or yourself is another matter entirely.
You can also easily get yourself killed through a stall/spin, flying into IMC/bad weather, etc.
A lot of pilot training is how to plan for weather, check performance, handle emergencies, and not create chaos for everyone else.
Flying is easy to those for whom it's become second nature. At first it's really very difficult to get the plane to do (and keep doing) what you want (or what ATC instructs). At some point, you realize that you're holding a heading and altitude without really thinking about it, while doing a several other things. I think it really depends on who you ask and a whole host of other variables just how easy flying is.
The hard things about flying any plane are
1. Landing.
2. Knowing what to do when things go wrong. Any time you read about jets avoiding near collisions, landing in heavy crosswinds, landing safely after engine failure, etc etc, you have many checklists and years of rigorous training to thank for that.
Landing is tough because it’s somewhat counterintuitive. You need to maintain enough airspeed to avoid a stall but obviously you need to slow down to lose altitude and, you know, stop.
Flying is easy. Taking off is easy. Landing is tricky.
Never got far past my PPL decades ago (less than 100 hours total iirc) but landing was always such a fun dance in Pipers and Cessnas, slipping the plane into the cross-wind to line up the plane at the last moment before touching done.
Yeah. I've been in an A320 simulator before for a few hours. They are pretty easy to fly and land. What isn't easy is getting one in a state ready to fly and to the runway. I can fly a Cessna 172 (didn't get enough solo hours for PPL though) and it's not difficult. Again prep is the hardest bit.
Oh yeah for larger jet aircraft certainly it is. I read that apparently the SR-71 preflight was so big it was performed by a backup crew and the primary crew had the option to simply jump in and fly if the timetable required it. But a small single engine aircraft isn't nearly as bad
Is the SR-71 the one that leaked fuel until it had warmed up and that required another jet engine to be attached to it to act as a starter motor?
Probably drug smuggling… this is kind of like the plot in Landman
Pretty much my first thought as well. I'd probably setup some kind of lo-jack + dashcam setup to try and get images of the "burrowing" person(s) though.
You'd think maybe the DEA, ATF, FBI and/or FAA would find enough interest in this to operate some level of sting operation or crack down.
I absolutely loved this book: https://www.amazon.com/Barefoot-Bandit-Colton-Harris-Moore-A...
Written by a guy who actually lived on the islands where this was happening (where I also happen to live).
Keep in mind that this isn't really equivalent, cost-wise, to the crime of taking a car for a joyride -- airplane engines have rigorous maintenance schedules that require expensive overhauls, and aviation gasoline looks to be over double the price of "car" gasoline (and the MPG for that Cessna is probably half that of a decent car).
This reminds me of the Douglas Adam's biscuit story. Maybe there's a plane that looks like his one hangar over or something.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/l4k9he/douglas_ad...
Every time Douglas Adams' biscuit story is told, I laugh as hard as if I were hearing it for the first time.
I think it goes back to Jerome K Jerome, at least.
Look around for an identical plane in apparent disrepair.
Can we just not assume drugs or some other crime?
Edit: also this version of the biscuit story is missing the final extra flavor text! The version I read ended something like, “What I love about this tragedy is that there is another bloke who has been telling the exact same story about an insane person stealing their biscuits. Except his version does not end on the punchline.”
I read somewhere that a surprising number of car thefts are just for transportation across town
hold on, i've got an idea for a startup...
is it a screwdriver?
... it has wifi.
Very bizarre. To fly a plane out, won't the pilot of the plane have to speak with ATC? I wonder if letting the ATC (of the municipal airport) be informed that this plane tends to be flown by someone who might not be authorized might help?
Unless you're inside a place with special flight rules (like the Washington DC area), you can just fly your plane whenever you want and don't have to file a flight plan or tell anyone. Small airports often don't have ATC so all communications are on a single frequency that all pilots trying to take off or land are tuned into. It's like being at a four way stop sign, there's "right of way" protocol to follow so you don't need to do much other than just announce your intentions to anyone that cares to hear them.
Really the only way to handle this is to put your plane in a locked hanger or chain it to the ground with a lock and then pay for whatever flight tracker that will alert you whenever a specific tail number is in the air. Follow it and then call whatever local police when it lands.
Can a small tower tell that an airplane doesn’t match the id sent by the pilot?
The question doesn't quite make sense. Tail numbers and ICAO hex IDs identify the aircraft, not the crew.
It depends on the airport! Some smaller airports (like Corona Municipal Airport where the story is based) - are untowered, meaning that there's no central ATC to chat with when taking off/landing - everyone announces what they're doing as they're doing it and there's a traffic pattern/flow that everyone follows to ensure there's no conflicts - it works surprisingly well.
In the US, you can get shockingly very far without having to chat with ATC.
That's true of most small airports. There are over 5,000 public airports in the US (and another ~14k private airports), but only about 500 with ATC.
> everyone announces what they're doing
Well, most people. :)
There's no "requirement" that pilots announce their intentions on the common frequency at uncontrolled airports, some aircraft may not even have radios.
> no "requirement" that pilots announce their intentions on the common frequency at uncontrolled airports, some aircraft may not even have radios
Got to love it when a Citation whose pilot is to arrogant to radio and a crop duster that doesn’t have any instruments to speak of are both in the pattern.
There have been many times I just decided to come back to the airport a bit later. Or circle well above the airport and watch the chaos below.
> circle well above the airport and watch the chaos below
Having been cut off by that particular pilot once in the pattern and once when I was holding short, I’m absolutely there for everyone on CTAF absolutely tearing them apart for a straight two minutes until someone from UNICOM tells the Vietnam vets in their hangars to shut the fuck up. (Eastern Idaho. Uncontrolled.)
The article said the airplane is based at KAJO, which is barely within the lateral boundary of Ontario International’s Class C shelf. To legally avoid a requirement to talk to ATC going north, he would have to stay below 2,700 MSL and remain outside the KONT Class C core. There’s a lot of area to the south and east that a pilot could buzz around without having to talk to anyone. Avoiding terrain to the south would be important.
Plenty of airports do not have controlled airspace. I've been to at least one where the local frequency was played on a loudspeaker on the ground so that people on the runway knew when a plane was coming in for a landing. The pilot still should communicate what they are doing, but they don't need approval to land.
The article says that he found cigarette butts in the airplane. This DNA evidence would make it straightforward for the police to find the culprit if they wanted to.
Possessing someone's DNA doesn't automatically, magically tell you who they are. If there's nothing to match it to then all you have is someone's spit.
Are they barefoot?
My cars been stolen twice and both times, given the type of car, where it was stolen, and where it was abandoned the cops said it was most likely stolen to conduct a drug deal and then ditched
Seems plausible that something like that may be going on here
This is actually a plot line in Landman, where the cartel occasionally steals the oil company's jet and then returns it.
The person probably thinks it’s his own plane that’s flying it.
Maybe they have a similar plane and simply thinks that plane is there own.
It's probably just that new startup, Aero. It's like Turo, except airplanes instead of cars. Also, they don't tell the airplane owners.
But seriously, there are lots of airplanes sitting on ramps for months at a time with no security so it's a minor miracle it doesn't happen more often.
https://archive.ph/ujPYV
So a perfectly good plane that someone could enjoy and fly sits languishing at an airport because the owner, who now can't fly or doesn't want to, won't sell it? I get the attachment and all. However, if you know there's a finite number of these things then please sell it to someone who would use it.
That's a golden age plane and it should be flown. Too bad many people would rather let something rot.
Also, I don't support stealing a plane.
> because the owner, who now can't fly or doesn't want to, won't sell it
It’s an airworthy 1958 Cessna for a reason. Planes like these don’t depreciate like cars, by time, but like engines: flight time is the principal determiner of deterioration. (For pressurised planes its pressure cycles.) The only thing being “wasted” here might be hangar space.