Someone keeps stealing a California man’s plane and taking it for joyrides, before returning it — and the owner can’t figure out who or why.
Jason Hong, 75, owns a 1958 Cessna Skyhawk single-engine plane. He told the Los Angeles Times that although he doesn’t fly much anymore, he went to visit his plane on July 27 — his birthday — only to find it wasn’t in its hangar at Corona Municipal Airport, which is just east of Anaheim.
“I got confused,” he told the paper. “I thought, ‘did I park it somewhere else, did the airport manager move it?’ But I looked all over.”
Hong began asking around for details on what may have happened to his plane, and eventually learned that on at least two occasions, an unknown pilot had been flying it across Southern California. Neither he nor police could figure out who had taken his plane.
He reported the aircraft missing and hoped police could locate his “old treasure.”
Two days later, someone from the La Verne Police Department called and told him the plane had been located at Brackett Field Airport, about 25 miles northeast of Corona Municipal Airport.
Hong traveled to the airport and found his plane parked, no worse for wear aside from garbage and cigarette butts that had been left in the cockpit.
To prevent any further joyrides, Hong decided to pull the battery out of the plane. He planned to return the next weekend to clean it up and give it an inspection to ensure whoever snatched his plane hadn’t damaged the aircraft.
On August 3, Hong returned to the airport to start working on his plane, only to find it had again disappeared.
He reported the plane missing again. And again, he received a call, this time from the El Monte Police Department. His plane had been found at San Gabriel Valley Airport, approximately 18 miles west of Brackett Field Airport.
He traveled to yet another a new airport to find his plane. When he located it, he found that someone had replaced its battery.
Sergeant Robert Montanez of the Corona Police Department told the LA Times that the plane “keeps disappearing out of the blue.”
People don’t typically steal planes. It’s so rare that the Corona Police Department had to give Hong paperwork meant for stolen cars to make his report.
Unfortunately for police and Hong, there’s no surveillance video available that captured images of the joyriding pilot, and “no real leads,” according to Montanez.
Hong used Flight Aware, which uses public information to track airplane flights, and saw that the pilot flew his plane twice on his 75th birthday, including one flight that left at 1:30 am.
He assumes based on the number of flights and the times at which the pilot was traveling that whoever is flying his plane has flight training, as “landing is not easy,” according to Hong.
The mystery pilot not only apparently knows how to fly, but also how to maintain a plane. Hong pointed out that in order to change the battery, the pilot would have to have both the tools and the knowledge needed to complete the job.
Hong estimates that between a new battery, the tools needed to do the repair, and a new headset he found inside the cockpit, the mystery pilot likely has spent hundreds of dollars just to keep his old Cessna in the sky.
“Someone breaks into your house, they’re looking for jewelry or cash right?” he told the LA Times. “But in this case, what’s the purpose? It’s like someone breaks my window, and then they put a new one up.”
The only thing resembling a lead is a description of a woman in her 40’s or 50’s who another pilot at the San Gabriel Valley Airport saw sitting in his plane on multiple occasions. She stood out to the pilot because he couldn’t understand why she’d sit around in a hot cockpit rather than inside the airport’s air conditioned lounge.
Hong has chained the airplane up at San Gabriel Valley Airport and is holding off flying it until he can get an inspection done on the plane. For now, his plane is likely secured, but Hong is no closer to learning who keeps taking his plane and why.
“It’s the strangest thing,” he told the paper.
