Police captured the pilot of a stolen Canadian plane late Monday night, ending a bizarre pursuit that began in Thunder Bay, Ont., and ended in a small Missouri town.
The pilot took a single-engine Cessna 172 from a Thunder Bay aviation school and soon crossed into U.S. airspace. Authorities scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to track the aircraft as it made its way over Wisconsin and Illinois.
Nearly eight hours later, at about 10 p.m. ET, the pilot landed on a dirt road in the southern Missouri town of Ellsinore and fled on foot.
Officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation then arrested 31-year-old suspect Yavuz Burke, a native of Turkey who became a Canadian citizen last year. He was formerly known as Adam Leon.
Earlier, the North American Aerospace Defense Command had scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to track the plane.
Lt.-Cmdr. Gary Ross, a spokesperson for NORAD, said the pilot did not respond to radio calls from the jets or the FAA.
He also said the pilot refused to acknowledge the nonverbal communications from the F-16 jets to follow them. It appears the plane only landed as it came close to running out of fuel.
The plane was reported stolen at about 2:30 p.m. ET and was spotted flying erratically.
At about 5 p.m., the state capital building in Madison, Wis., was evacuated before the plane passed near the region. Police cars cordoned off the streets around the building and officers told people to move away from the area.
The small plane belongs to Confederation College’s aviation program and was taken off from the Thunder Bay International Airport.
According to local radio, someone jumped the fence and took off on an unauthorized flight.
City police are at the scene at the college’s hangar. Police spokesperson Chris Adams says officers have little to go on at the time.
According to Cessna’s website, the Cessna 172 Skyhawk is world’s most flown airplane. It has a maximum cruise speed of 233 kilometres an hour and a range of 1,130 km.
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I do not know much about planes but is there a key like in a car or can you just jump in and start the engine…?
How handy: he JUST became a citizen of Canada a year ago – from a Muslim country. He changes his name for no known reason. He just happens to luck into a fully-gassed plane, with the keys in it – and just happens to be a pretty good pilot, apparently. And he was so distraught he chose Suicide by F-16?
Oh, please! Suicidal people do not go on 6-hour long excursions into another country, just to off themselves. If they’re serious, they want to do it without intervention, and they want to do it NOW, before they lose their nerve.
Call me a “conspiracy nut” all you want, but I believe this was a test flight to determine what kind of security response would be triggered by a small private aircraft invading American airspace from our friendly Canadian neighbors’ skies. And he was cheerful and happy when they caught up to him because he GOT the info he wanted: he found out that our fighter jets would “pursue and observe” ONLY…
And when they search this clown’s digs back in Canada, how much you wanna bet he’ll have the standard Jihadist literature, and they’ll learn that he was a devoted member of the local mosque that routinely preaches hatred of all non-Muslims. (Oh, but he never really listened…)
But they’ll continue to reassure US he was just another loner with mental health issues…