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.

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.

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 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.

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.”

Every time Douglas Adams' biscuit story is told, I laugh as hard as if I were hearing it for the first time.

Look around for an identical plane in apparent disrepair.

This is actually a plot line in Landman, where the cartel occasionally steals the oil company's jet and then returns it.

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.

There was a terrible reality show about this. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1808720

Involuntary idle airplane sharing, monetization, and littering. Approved by 4 out of 5 drug runners and human smugglers.

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?

> she isn't "fixing" it

The idea of a rando doing unknown maintenance on my plane is downright horrifying.

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.

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?

I'm leaning towards it being some extremely cheeky DCS/flightsim nerd because of the shortness and randomness of the flights.

> 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.

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.

VFR (visual) flights don’t require filing a flight plan.

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...

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.

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.

*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

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.

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.

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.

Some years ago I was flying home, and it turned out someone had called in a bomb threat. So, naturally, they had ramped up the security scan to the max, causing a massive queue.

The landside area was packed to the brim with travelers waiting in line, mixed with the people on their way to check-in pushing their trollies loaded with suitcases.

I've never been so scared, waiting in line for security, as I imagined how easily anyone could pack 6-7 huge suitcases filled with explosives onto a trolley in the parking lot right outside, move into the packed crowd without suspicion and set it off.

No need to get on a plane.

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.

hold on, i've got an idea for a startup...

> 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.