How a lonely boy flew to his death in a tiny, stolen plane

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Boy pilot left note backing al-Qa'ida attacks

Leading article: Airports should stop stalling and act now on security

The plane was so small the wreckage could be hauled into the building through the hole left in the wall. Apart from the lone pilot, nobody was killed.

The crash of the Cessna into a skyscraper in Tampa, Florida, on Saturday afternoon appears to have been a 15-year-old boy's suicide mission, a deliberate copy of the attacks of 11 September that traumatised America.

Yesterday, emergency crews removed the twisted fuselage left dangling from the hole torn in the 28th and 29th floors of the 42-storey Bank of America building while workers took away one wing that had tumbled to the street below.

As they did so police said that Charles Bishop, the bright high school boy who loved flying, had left a suicide note indicating he sympathised with Osama bin Laden and supported the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

At a news conference yesterday, Bennie Holder, the Tampa police chief, confirmed the existence of the three-paragraph note, though he refused to make public its text. "He indicated he was acting alone. We are treating this as a suicide," Mr Holder said. "There is no indication he was connected with any terrorist organisation."

The note adds another bizarre ingredient to a story already full of them. Mohamed Atta and others among his hijacker colleagues took lessons at a flight school in Venice, Florida, only 50 miles to the south of Tampa.

And Bishop, in his 20-minute flight from the flying school at St Petersburg civil airport across the bay into downtown Tampa, briefly entered the forbidden airspace over MacDill Air Force Base ­ the head quarters of US Central Command in charge of the anti-terror war in Afghanistan.

All in all, the incident was serious enough for President George Bush to be briefed on the crash, one of three involving small aircraft almost simultaneously in Florida, California and Colorado. The White House quickly dismissed any terrorist connection with the incidents, describing them as a "tragic coincidence".

Everything had seemed normal when Bishop was dropped off at the National Aviation Academy flight school by his mother and grandmother for a scheduled 5pm flying lesson. He was early, so an instructor told him to check the equipment in the Cessna they would be using. Suddenly, Bishop, an avid and apparently able pilot even though he hadn't reached the minimum 16 years of age to fly solo, commandeered the plane. At 4.50pm he took off, without clearance and without having made contact with the air traffic control tower.

Within minutes, a Coast Guard helicopter was ordered to check out the plane as it approached the airspace over MacDill while two F-15 fighters, scrambled from Homestead Air Force base south of Miami, were streaking north-west to intercept and if necessary shoot down the Cessna.

Bishop either did not see or deliberately ignored radio signals and frantic hand gestures from the helicopter crew telling him to land. Instead he flew on across the bay before his Cessna slammed into the Bank of America building at an estimated 100mph.

Fortunately however, and unlike the airliners that slammed into the World Trade Centre, the Cessna did not explode. Also the business offices that took the direct hit were empty for the weekend, and the 50 people in the building at the time were evacuated without problem. Otherwise the casualty toll might have been much higher.

Bishop himself was said by classmates to be a loner, a "pretty quiet" boy who kept to himself. "He rode my bus to school and sat in the front row. He always had sunglasses on for some reason," recalled David Ontiveros, 14, a neighbour in the apartment complex where Bishop lived with his mother. "He never talked to anybody."

Agents from the FBI and federal aviation authorities have been questioning Bishop's relatives and friends, including his mother, who was unaware of her son's state of mind. But according to other accounts, he appeared despondent in the days before his death.

Michael Cronin, an attorney and spokesman for the flight school, said Bishop had been taking lessons since March 2001 and had logged six hours in the air. Often, Mr Cronin said, he offered to clean planes in exchange for flying, and was very familiar with operations at the centre. There was nothing unusual, he said, in students making the pre-flight equipment checks on their own, before being joined by an instructor. "The bottom line is that he essentially stole the aircraft," Mr Cronin added. "We aren't going to speculate what his mental state or motivations were."

The affair has had one unintended consequence. The strict aviation security in effect since 11 September has hit operators of small planes hard, closing down some local airfields. Operators have pleaded their aircraft were too small to cause much damage. However sad, the incident in Tampa suggests they have a point.