Pilot crashes plane into building after unauthorized takeoff

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - Workers on Sunday pulled in the crumpled remains of a small airplane that had been dangling from a skyscraper after a 15-year-old student pilot crashed. Officials said the boy was flying without permission and had been pursued by a Coast Guard helicopter and two military jets.

Charles J. Bishop of Palm Harbor was killed in the Saturday evening crash, according to Tampa Police.

Bishop expressed "sympathies" for Osama bin Laden but said in a suicide note that he acted alone, authorities said Sunday, according to USA Today

"From this action, we can assume he was a troubled young man," Tampa Police Chief Bennie Holder said.

Officials wouldn't disclose the exact nature of Charles Bishop's short suicide note. But his final act raised questions about small planes and air space security

The crash occurred after Bishop's grandmother took him to the National Aviation Academy flight school for a 5 p.m. flying lesson, Marianne Pasha, a Pinellas County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman, said.

An instructor told Bishop to check equipment on the four-seat 2000 Cessna 172R before the lesson, Pasha said.

"The next thing the instructor knew he was gone," Pasha said.

Though terrorism was quickly discounted, the televised image of a plane blasting a hole in the side of a skyscraper was a chilling reminder of the Sept.11 attacks. The plane's tail dangled near the 28th floor of the 42-story Bank of America building.

Only a few office workers and the staff of a club were in the building at the time of the crash. There were no injuries.

Bishop had been taking lessons since March 2001 and had logged about six hours of flight time, Michael Cronin, an attorney for the National Aviation Academy, said.

The boy often bartered to clean planes in exchange for flight time and was very familiar with operations at the school, Cronin said.

Students do preflight equipment checks on their own, then have their accuracy verified by an instructor. Bishop was a year shy of being able to fly alone and two years too young to earn a pilot's license.

"The bottom line is he essentially stole the aircraft," Cronin said. "We aren't going to speculate what his mental state or motivations were."

A Coast Guard helicopter on routine patrol intercepted the plane and attempted to give the pilot visual signals to land at a small airport, but the pilot did not respond, Coast Guard Lt. j.g. Charlotte Pittman said. Two F-15 fighter jets were also scrambled from Homestead Air Reserve Base as a precaution, Capt. Kirstin Reimann at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said.

Sheriff's Sgt. Greg Tita said the FBI was interviewing Bishop's family and there was no record of the ninth grader running into problems with the law in the past.

The 28th floor of the building hit houses the law firm of Shumaker, Loop and Kendrick. Managing partner Greg Yadley said one attorney and her husband were in the offices at the time of the crash, but were not injured. An hour before, he said, an attorney had been at a desk the plane smashed into.

"It could have been possibly a tragic situation," Yadley said. "We were lucky."

Two other small planes had crashed Saturday, one on a Colorado hillside near Boulder, and another in a vacant field near Los Angeles.

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