A fart upwind is terrorism to they who want to see it
yeah, don't even worry about that yet man.
William |
August 19, 2016 1:17 AM | Reply
A piper tomahawk is a light 2 seat trainer. I have flown small aircraft, including that type, for thirty years, and keep IFR current. Credibility established!
No amount of flight sim ground training will allow a person to take off / land a small aircraft. You will almost certainly be unable to even start it. It isn't a car. Fuel valves must be set, pumps activated and shut off, engine primed, mixture full rich, magneto set to the impulse mag only, throttle cracked, and press the starter. Once it fires you advance the throttle to about 800 rpm, switch to both mags, and then lean the mixture. Every aircraft is also slightly different due to the accumulation of little changes over time. Some of these little trainers are fourty or more years old.
If that young, allegedly mentally ill, man managed to get that far in the dark with no hands on training it borders on miraculous. Just taxiing in the dark is unbelievably disorienting, let alone taking off into the dark. Fully trained and experienced daytime VFR pilots won't even attempt it, and for good and lethal reasons, without some sort of in the aircraft training.
Small airfields have no security at all. People generally lock the doors as the avionics are expensive, and take the mag key home to prevent accidents. This one was stolen from a shop, which was almost certainly locked, while it was undergoing its annual inspection. Per a video of the owner that I saw it wasn't even fully serviceable yet - even more amazing that it flew at all. Any persons car is far more dangerous than a light aircraft. Nice, for example...
While I can speculate as to the intentions of an allegedly mentally ill man with a history of attempted crime named Mohammed, as can anyone with a lick of cmmon sense, I can provide a solid opinion on the practicality of an untrained person stealing an airplane and successfully flying it any distance in the dark.
It is so unlikely (flat out impossible is closer to the truth) that it might just be true.
Or ... He had some training that his dad was unaware of, or unwilling to admit to knowing of.
