Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Pilotless: Three Planes That Flew Themselves." video.
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There have been many more pilotless private aircraft that have presented problems to civilian authorities. I was involved with chasing one Piper Cub that actually took off without a pilot, climbed to about 2500 feet, leveled off, still with no pilot, and flew west. It crossed over six counties before it became our problem. My department had a helicopter, so we were detailed to get in the air and try to find the plane and follow it.
It took a while to find it because we only had weather radar, and the FAA was only able to give us partial radar tracks since a Cub without a transponder is actually a great stealth aircraft, being mostly canvas over a collection of steel alloy tubes. There was only about an hour of daylight left when we spotted it, still flying straight and level. Our first issue was it was headed directly toward a range of mountains with 3,000 foot peaks. While we thought the Cub would not make it over the mountains, it somehow flew through one of the few passes that was less than 2,000 feet and continued on its merry way.
Now we really had problems, since the plane was headed toward an urban area of the county. Norad was still trying to find a fighter to scramble, and the FAA wanted to know if we were able to shoot the plane down. Sure. Between myself and the other observer, our armament consisted of two Glock .40 caliber pistols, and it was quickly decided that our air to air combat training wasn't adequate to attempt that stunt. As the Cub flew over various cities, we now had police cars and fire departments from I don't know how many jurisdictions that had joined in the ground chase. The pilot of the Cub, which had landed at a small private airport to answer the call of nature and had left the engine running while he did , was finally able to update the FAA with the amount of fuel he "thought" he had onboard, and they calculated that the plane should have about 25 minutes of fuel left. It was only flying at 65 mph, and our Long Ranger was able to easily fly at 120 mph, so we were able to get out ahead of the plane to alert the now considerable number of ground units where the Cub was likely to be in the next five minutes, and then zip back behind it. We had a great pilot that flew Hueys in Vietnam, and I think he was actually enjoying this.
The Cub eventually flew over 11 cities in our county before heading toward the sparsely populated coast. It was now nearing sunset as the Cub flew directly into the setting sun. The Cub had its newly installed anti-collision strobe light on, and that allowed us to follow it at that point. Now this ghost plane started to descend, and the Coast Range of mountains presented our next problem. There are 1,500 to 1,900 foot peaks there, and the Cub had reached about 1,000 feet before approaching the mountains. We put some distance between our aircraft and the Cub, and waited for the inevitable crash. To our surprise, the next thing we saw was the Cub flying through a 600 foot pass, missing those rocks in the sky again. We were able to follow the Cub with our FLIR now, and almost at the second the plane was over the coast, the prop stopped spinning, and the poor old Cub was finally out of fuel. It went into a steeper but still level decent, making contact with the water about four miles offshore. The Cub was a beautifully restored 1940 model J3 that we had seen at various airshows, and it was a sad thing to watch her sink. Still, we were glad that ordeal was over with. In my 27 years with the department, that was one of my more exciting days. :-)
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