Colton Harris-Moore has become something of a folk hero. Nineteen-year-old kid, stealing planes and boats, eluding law enforcement for two years… What an adventure!
Well, an ‘adventure’ to him, and a nice anti-Establishment romp for people who don’t look past the surface. But as a (lapsed) pilot, I have an issue with the destruction he’s wrought on perfectly-good airplanes. Not to mention the other thefts and damage. He deserves to be locked up. Nevertheless, his life might make a good movie.
Thank goodness. I’m so tired of the press writing endlessly about how he’s being turned into a folk hero by, guess who, the press.
I have no sympathy for someone who can’t figure out how to land someone else’s plane without wrecking it, yet keeps at it. Nineteen is way too old for this. He’s been a petty crook for many years now. I can’t help but wonder if he has FAS or some other disorder preventing him from learning not to make the same mistakes over and over and over again.
Then again, at least one article I read indirectly made the point that if it hadn’t been for all the publicity, maybe he wouldn’t have been caught (at least until he hurt someone). I mean, he managed to escape the country by himself, without any passport or money. That seems kind of remarkable to me.
How did he fly from Bloomington, Indiana, where he apparently stole the plane, to the Bahamas? Did he have to refuel, and if so, how did that happen? How can a small plane, flying without a filed flight plan not get noticed by anyone in air traffic control or the military? Stealing boats and cars and such I can see, stealing and flying a plane over US airspace surprises me.
And I see from pictures of him in custody that he was barefoot when caught. Want to bet that mommy dearest’s new ‘entertainment lawyer’ advised her to pass that on to him, in case he was caught?
This has gotten lots of local press since the last plane was taken from Bloomington, and I’ve read that the plane he took had the range to make it without refueling to the Bahamas. I’ll let a pilot like Johnny L.A. address the flight plan thing, but from things I’ve read apparently it isn’t nearly as big of a deal as most of us non-flyers would expect.
His Mom is quite a piece of work… she was mad that he broke the rule of only stealing twin engine planes, and she wanted him to escape to somewhere that didn’t have and extradition agreement with the US.
Most of these people who celebrate him as a “folk hero” would probably lose their shit if someone so much as took their yogurt from the fridge at work.
True, plus I have to raise an eyebrow or two at the “Robin Hood” theme I’ve seen posited. Aside from the fact that most of his victims were hardly on the “rich” end of the spectrum, he gave to . . . whom, exactly?
I’ll have to defer to someone else, as I haven’t flown across international borders. I’ve only read the rules, and that was a very long time ago. IIRC you need to give Customs an hour’s notice before entering U.S. airspace, and I think there is a departure notification as well. (I don’t have my AIM handy.) I believe a flight plan is required for international flights. Of course a criminal doesn’t worry about such regulations unless he has to. In any case, people fly across borders every day and I think the Caribbean is a popular destination for GA pilots.
What surprised me is the distance – in two ways. Being unfamiliar with that part of the world, I didn’t know that Indiana and the Bahamas were so close. Heck, it’s a shorter distance than from my house to Los Angeles! The other thing was that the airplane had the range to make it there. I didn’t pay much attention to the kind of plane that was stolen until this latest report. It was a Cessna 400. According to Wiki, it has a range of 1,274 statute miles. A Cessna 172 has a range of almost 800 miles at economy cruise. But we’d have to stop halfway to refuel on trips to Oregon. (We flew with the throttle to the wall.) Dad’s Cessna 182 had long-range tanks, and could make the trip without stopping. But we’d stop anyway because those seats became very uncomfortable after a while.
I’m a flight instructor. Not having a great deal of international flight experience, I’ll mostly address this in terms of U.S. airspace.
It’s precisely because of flying without a flight plan that he would not draw much attention. Flight plans are not required in many circumstances. Flying under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) they’re almost never required. As long as you avoid certain types of controlled airspace, you could land at most small airports, buy fuel and attract no attention whatsoever.
Such a plane would appear on many ATC radar scopes enroute, but only as an unidentified VFR target. If he was smart enough to turn off the transponder (again, perfectly legal in a lot of airspace), he would only appear as a “primary target” with no ID code, VFR or otherwise. This would only attract serious attention if he went into controlled airspace improperly.
I’ll speculate just a bit to say that leaving the coastal U.S. airspace would probably draw some attention. However, being that he’s going AWAY from the U.S., I’m guessing they’d consider it a more serious problem only if he turned around and tried to come back without an ADIZ flight plan (permission to penetrate the Air Defense Initiation Zone). Otherwise, it probably becomes the problem of the country he lands in.
Hopefully a judge will make sure this thieving little shit won’t make a penny from any film or book. This guy isn’t a folk hero or a Robin Hood or a rebel. He’s a felon who needs to go to prison. I’m really sick of the local talking heads who always have this little smirk on their faces when they report on this fucker.
Before he went on his recent crime spree he escaped/walked away from some kind of mental health group home. I would doubt if he gets any more low security incarceration options. But if he does you just know that he is going to try to escape again and do it all over. He thinks it’s all funny.