Expert: Student pilot likely hit building by mistake

Aviation analyst Jim McKenna

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Authorities are trying to figure out why a 15-year-old student pilot, flying a Cessna 172 aircraft without permission, crashed into a Tampa, Florida, skyscraper and died.

Charles J. Bishop was killed Saturday evening when his single-engine plane slammed into the 42-story Bank of America Building in downtown Tampa.

Jim McKenna, former editor of Aviation Weekly and former executive director of Aviation Safety Alliance, has been following aviation issues for 15 years. McKenna took time to answer questions about the Tampa crash.

CNN: Do you see this crash as a copycat incident in the aftermath of the September 11 plane attacks on Washington and New York?

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MCKENNA: I doubt it. You know, the Federal Aviation Administration was able to track this airplane. You know, it's a young pilot who had really just started his flight training. He was being pursued at the time by a Coast Guard helicopter, which would be a startling circumstance for any new pilot in an airplane. I bet that he probably hit that building because he just lost sense of where he was in the sky.

You know, it's interesting to note that the airplane hit the side of the building. Where if you look at the World Trade Center attacks, those planes pretty much aimed for the center of the building. I would bet that this kid was trying to fly past the building and missed his mark.

CNN: This was an unauthorized takeoff, so how can a 15-year-old take off in a plane like this, unauthorized?

MCKENNA: Well, since the first days of World War II, it's been a national priority in this country to encourage youngsters to learn how to fly. A lot of the pilots who are flying those pinpoint precision bombing raids in Afghanistan were pilots who learned to fly when they were teen-agers.

So we have set up in this country a system in which it's very easy, very encouraging to get youngsters out at the airport familiar with airplanes and accessible for them to fly. It's based in large part on the principle that everybody who gets involved in that system is someone whose end objective is to learn how to be a good, safe pilot -- not someone who's going to be considering the airplane a weapon. So that means that there are very few restrictions and hurdles in terms of getting access to an airport and an airplane for a general aviation pilot of this type.

CNN: How do you prevent unauthorized takeoffs, especially in a time like this with the heightened security?

MCKENNA: Well, there have been a number of measures that have been proposed since September 11. For instance, folks have proposed greater restrictions on the keys that you need to get into the airplane and start the airplane. They've proposed reissuing pilots' licenses so that they're more of a photo ID that's easily checked, that they can't be counterfeited easily. But we have to look at what are our priorities at this time, post-September 11.

We need to improve airport security; we need to improve our ability to track and profile terrorists and keep them off big airplanes where they can kill a lot of people in one shot. Eventually, the government and the aviation industry will get down to improving security for general aviation, but I don't think anybody would agree that it's a high priority for us to tackle right now.

CNN: This 15-year-old had been flying for two years, we were told. How do you judge his ability to fly with that much experience? Is he pretty good, is he average, is he more advanced?

MCKENNA: There's no way to tell. The initial reports coming out are that he'd been training for two years. Other reports said that he had about six hours of flight time at this particular school from which the airplane was stolen and he had been flying there since March, which would not be a lot of time involved in training. So it's far too early to tell how skilled a pilot he was.

You know, it's relatively easy to get in an airplane and taxi it out to a runway. It's relatively easy to get the airplane to take off. It's a lot more difficult to fly the airplane on a steady course and much more difficult to land it. So, you know, there's no way to tell at this point how skilled a pilot he was.

CNN: Fifteen just seems so young.

MCKENNA: It is young. It's entirely legal for a kid like that to start training. The FAA regulations say you can't formerly start your training until you're 16, which simply means you can't log the time as a pilot until you've got a student pilot's license. You can't fly the airplane legally on your own until you're at least 17.

But again we get back to the idea that we want a lot of kids getting interested in flying so that -- as a national security priority -- we have a steady stream of pilots to serve the nation. And that means that we try to get kids in young when they're teen-agers.