A man is dead after crashing an airplane near the Texas-Oklahoma border on Wednesday, with officials saying the man had stolen the craft from a local airport before the deadly crash.
The Texas Department of Public Safety is investigating an incident regarding a single-engine Cessna 172 that crashed into a field near the Fannin and Lamar county lines on January 24. The plane had been stolen from the ATP Flight School at Addison Airport, according to NBC 5 DFW.
The pilot of the aircraft, who has since been identified as 23-year-old Logan Timothy James of Stokesdale, North Carolina, had spoken to air traffic controllers as he stole it.
“I’m not going to listen to y’alls instructions. I’m just heading to East Texas. I’m going to pull the comm 1 circuit breaker and comm 2 circuit break soon as I unkey the mic,” said James in the recording, according to NBC 5.
James took off from the airport at 6:53 p.m. and crashed into the field less than two hours later at 8:15 p.m. after flying 80 miles toward Paris. When officials reached the crash site, they found James dead from the crash.
The Texas DPS and Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the circumstances surrounding the theft and crash of the aircraft. Aviation expert Armen Kurdian told NBC 5 that this investigation will attempt to determine why James was flying the craft and why the plane crashed.
“The accident investigation should hopefully answer a lot of those questions about why he got in there and probably interview anybody that he knew like parents, friends, that sort of thing,” said Kurdian, per NBC 5. “And of course maybe some of the flight instructors at that school assuming he was actually attending that flight school as a student.”
This is not the first deadly plane crash to have occurred in North Texas this month. A local school board trustee and two of his children were killed in a plane crash near Poolville on January 14, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.