Stolen Canadian Plane Lands In Missouri

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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Pilots Landing at Seattle-Tacoma Airport Report Lasers

Pilots on 12 jetliners landing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Sunday reported that someone was shining a green laser light into their cockpits, bringing renewed attention to a problem that has plagued pilots since the introduction of cheap laser pointers several years ago.

All the planes were targeted during a 20-minute period Sunday night, and all landed safely. But the incident led to pilots simultaneously trying to avoid being temporarily blinded by the light while trying to help authorities pinpoint its source, believed to be about a mile north of the airport.

Air traffic controllers continuously cautioned pilots about the light during the episode, which lasted from 7:10 to 7:30 p.m. PT.

“All right, I’ll keep an eye out for that,” one pilot responded before correcting himself. “Er, I’ll keep an eye away from that,” he said in radio traffic captured by LiveATC.net.

Another pilot reported the source to be a block and a half west of an interstate. Airport authorities said they conducted two searches of the area but did not find the culprit.

Laser attacks on aircraft have increased in recent years, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. There have been 148 incidents this year, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said.

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India Hijack threat: Security Stepped Up At All Airports

With the Centre receiving intelligence inputs about terrorists’ plan to hijack a plane or take control of non-functional airports or abandoned airstrips for aerial attack, the CISF has further heightened security at all airports where its personnel are posted. It has also held consultations with state police to beef up the perimeter security.

The civil aviation ministry has also alerted states and UTs over proper security of non-functional airports. CISF, in turn, on Friday briefed home ministry officials about the measures being taken by it.

CISF, an official said, had been on high alert ever since it received intelligence inputs earlier this month suggesting terrorists’ gameplan of using the air route. “The civil aviation ministry has circulated some instructions to all the airports,” home minister P Chidambaram told reporters after the Cabinet meeting on Friday. He, however, did not elaborate.

All airports across the country have been on a state of high alert with civil aviation secretary M Madhavan Nambiar writing to states and UTs to secure all airports and airstrips under their jurisdiction. There are about 340 airports and airstrips in the country, many of them non-functional. A large number of these airstrips are of World War II vintage.

Besides securing the airports, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) have also issued instructions for additional layers of personal and hand-baggage checking before a passenger boards an aircraft. They have also given directions that the strength of sky marshals be increased and they should be put on more flights, rather than on the already identified sectors like those in Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East.

With Lok Sabha elections nearing and the use of helicopters increasing, the DGCA will soon issue a new set of security guidelines for helicopter operators to report mandatorily to the local police before making landings at any unscheduled place.

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