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CNN Live At Daybreak

Timeline of Charles Bishop's Suicide Flight

Aired January 08, 2002 - 05:07   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: We want to turn now to that Florida plane crash, a very strange happening. According to teachers and flight instructors, 15-year-old Charles Bishop had everything to live for and state authorities say he deliberately crashed a small plane into a Tampa skyscraper.

CNN's Mark Potter has this timeline of events.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MARK POTTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Police say 15-year- old Charles Bishop stole a Cessna 172 from this flight line at an aviation school. According to several sources, he then took off from Clearwater around 4:50 Saturday afternoon. He flew close to Tampa International Airport, just as a Southwest Airlines 737 jet like this one was taking off for New Orleans with 129 people aboard. The control tower warned the jet pilot of the approaching Cessna and told him to level off so the Cessna could fly overhead.

JOE FORMOSA, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER: When he saw him, they were 1,000 feet apart. Southwest was around 2,700 feet and the Cessna was around 3,700 feet.

POTTER: A Southwest spokesman says at no time was safety compromised. Meanwhile, the control tower in Clearwater had alerted MacDill Air Force Base that a plane piloted by a 15-year-old student was headed there next.

LT. COL. RICH MCLAIN, U.S. AIR FORCE: At that time it was about three miles outside of our air space. He entered our air space about a minute later and was in our air space for somewhere around a minute.

POTTER: Around 4:58, MacDill called a Coast Guard helicopter to give chase. The chopper spotted the plane now headed for downtown Tampa and closed in, signaling the boy to stop.

GARY KONEFAL, WITNESS: They were side by side. And a friend of mine said, "Boy, they're really close. It looks that looks kind of strange."

POTTER: But the Cessna kept going, headed for the Bank of America building, where it crashed into the 28th floor. Tampa police say their first reports from an officer and a citizen came at 5:05 as calls flooded into 911. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Tampa fire rescue. What's the address of the emergency?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's on the corner of Kennedy and Ashley. It's the Bank of America building. A plane just flew into it.

POTTER (on camera): A spokesman for NORAD, the U.S. Air Defense Command, says at 5:13 officials there overheard FAA communications about the Cessna flight and scrambled two fighter jets from Homestead, Florida, to Tampa. They took off at 5:21, more than 15 minutes after the Cessna had already crashed.

Mark Potter, CNN, Clearwater.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: Thank you, Mark Potter. We'll have much more on that topic a little later on.

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