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A 23-year-old man is dead after stealing a plane from a Texas airport and crashing it 80 miles away.
Per a report from KXAS-TV, the plane in question was stolen from the ATP Flight School at Addison Airport on Wednesday. The person who stole and subsequently piloted the small plane was later identified as North Carolina resident Logan Timothy James.
When reached for comment by Complex, a rep for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed that the stolen plane was a single-engine Cessna 172. The FAA rep added that the plane crashed “northwest of Direct, Texas” around 8:15 p.m. local time on Wednesday.
“Only the pilot was on board,” the rep said in an email, adding that the investigation was being led by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
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The 23-year-old is heard in a flight recording telling air traffic controllers that he is “not going to listen to” their instructions.
"I'm just heading to East Texas," James said at one point in the recording.
All told, the stolen plane was in the air for just over an hour.
"NTSB is investigating the crash of a Cessna 172S airplane near Fannin County, Texas," an NTSB rep told Complex on Friday. "We are currently gathering information."
Complex has also reached out to the Texas Department of Public Safety and an Addison Airport rep for additional comment. This story may be updated.
This isn't the first time an incident involving a stolen plane has made headlines. In 2022, a man was arrested after allegedly stealing a small aircraft from an airport in Mississippi and threatening to crash it into a Walmart in the Tupelo area. Several months later, the man, identified as Cory Patterson, was reported to have died by suspected suicide while in custody.
