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Teen's flight sparks sparked flurry of calls, but no panic
By BILL ADAIR, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON -- As Charles Bishop flew the stolen Cessna 172 toward MacDill Air Force Base, a supervisor in the control tower at Tampa International Airport took a rapid series of phone calls. "That is an unauthorized departure," a controller from St. Petersburg-Clearwater told him. "Oh, really . . ." said the supervisor. "He just took off." A new transcript, released to the St. Petersburg Times under the Freedom of Information Act, shows a sudden flurry of calls between the Tampa supervisor and other control towers as the Federal Aviation Administration suddenly canceled all flights from the Tampa Bay area. The supervisor appears to stay calm, but there is clearly an urgency to his work. At one point, he warned the Sarasota-Bradenton tower to watch out for suspicious planes. "If you get anything that looks like anything unusual or taxiing around or takin' off, you just give us a call," he said. "You might want to notify somebody (about) any kind of unauthorized flight." Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration released a partial transcript of the conversations on Jan. 5 when Bishop crashed into a downtown Tampa building and was killed. The new conversations -- a brief one involving a Southwest Airlines crew and one 54 minutes long involving the Tampa supervisor -- show the urgency as FAA officials grounded all flights in the bay area. Initially, the 15-year-old boy was simply regarded as a nuisance. He had taken off without permission from St. Petersburg-Clearwater and did not communicate with controllers as he flew over Tampa Bay toward MacDill. Pilots of a Southwest Airlines jetliner were warned to avoid the Cessna immediately after they took off from Tampa. "It's some kid -- took off with the airplane unauthorized," a controller said. "That's great -- I hate it when that happens," said an unidentified voice, presumably one of the Southwest pilots. "Have the Air Force guys intercept him and give him a good scare." The Tampa supervisor acted quickly. About 20 seconds after he confirmed the boy's flight was unauthorized, he called MacDill. "I don't know what his intentions are. He's just flying around," he told the MacDill supervisor. About four minutes later, the MacDill supervisor reported that the Cessna had just flown over the base, right above the tanker planes that are constantly on alert at the end of MacDill's runway. "Hey, reference that aircraft that just over-flew us and everything like that -- he did a low fly-over (of) the alert aircraft," the MacDill supervisor said. The boy was being pursued by a Coast Guard helicopter, he said. After Bishop hit the building, the Tampa supervisor was flooded with calls from controllers and FAA officials. "We got anything going on there?" asked a controller from Miami. "We got a big thing going on down here," the supervisor said. "We just had a guy take off (from) St. Pete unauthorized and obviously crashed into a building (in) downtown Tampa, so right now we are kind of crowded with a lot of stuff here." He had rapid-fire conversations to alert the Sarasota tower and to confirm with St. Petersburg-Clearwater that it truly was a 15-year-old boy in the plane. He told an FAA official: "I don't know at this point if it was intentional, if it was an accident." A short time later, he got a call from the FAA's command center that departing flights in the bay area would be canceled for about two hours, so officials could be sure there were no other suspicious flights. "Tampa, this is Tony at the Command Center. Listen, we are going to put out a ground stop for traffic into the Tampa International Airport . . . that direction is coming from headquarters." -- Staff writer Bill Adair can be reached at (202) 463-0575 or adair@sptimes.com.
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