Stolen plane

[classicman]

WASHINGTON (CNN) --

The pilot of a small Cessna 172 aircraft reported stolen from a Canadian flight school landed near a Missouri highway late Monday and took off on foot, federal officials confirmed.
The plane, intercepted and tracked by U.S. military aircraft as it flew across the Midwest, landed on a dirt road off Highway 60, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman said. The pilot then fled on foot.

The plane landed in the town of Ellsinore, population 360, in southern Missouri, a dispatcher with the Carter County Sheriff's Office said.

A spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) said that about 9:20 p.m. ET, the Cessna was flying over southern Missouri, some 20 miles from the Arkansas border, "holding steady" at 3,000 feet -- down from the earlier altitude of 14,000 feet.

The NORAD spokesman, Mike Kucharek, said military pilots who intercepted the Cessna had tried repeatedly to get the pilot's attention and at one point, the pilot appeared to acknowledge that he saw the other aircraft.

"He looked at them," Kucharek said.

But the pilot had not communicated with NORAD or the Federal Aviation Administration, Kucharek added later in the evening. At 9:20 p.m., the pilot was believed to have had roughly 30 minutes of fuel left, Kucharek said.

Officials were "allowing this pilot to play his hand" because they "don't want to provoke the situation," Kucharek said.

A federal law enforcement official told CNN the pilot is a naturalized Canadian citizen, but declined to give his name or country of origin. The source said the pilot was a flight school student for a "brief" period and only clocked a few hours of flight time.

Canadian officials have received some information that the pilot is "not a happy individual," the official said.

The Cessna departed at about 3 p.m. ET and flew over Lake Superior less than half an hour later, according to NORAD officials. F-16 fighter jets intercepted the pilot near Michigan's upper peninsula border with Wisconsin at 4:43 p.m., and have tracked the Cessna since.

By evening, the Wisconsin National Guard deployed two F-16s of its own in an attempt to get the pilot to establish communications with FAA air traffic controllers.

The state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, was evacuated for less than an hour as a precaution.

FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the plane was reportedly stolen from a flight school in Thunder Bay, Canada, and the pilot had been identified as a student at the flight school.

It was only a Cessna, but still this guy took it for a seven hour ride with F-16's following him most of the time. Couldn't they have just forced him down? Was this perhaps a test to see what our response was to this type of aircraft? Should I get another ?