Imagine turning 75 years-old and deciding the perfect birthday present to yourself is a little quality time with your vintage Cessna 4-seater small plane.....
That is, until the Cessna decides it has other plans — like a multi-stop joyride across Southern California with no itinerary and even fewer apologies!!
Jason Hong calls his 1958 Cessna Skyhawk his “old treasure.”
But lately that treasure has been vanishing like socks from a dryer!
Hong arrived at California's Corona Municipal Airport hangar where his plane usually naps and was, understandably, baffled. “I got confused,” he said. “I thought, ‘Did I park it somewhere else? Did the airport manager move it?’ But I looked all over.”
Turns out, the plane had been relocated — not by the airport manager, not by the FAA, and not by any polite note left on a windshield...
It showed up at California's Brackett Field Airport, about 23 miles from Corona!
Hong found cigarette butts and trash in the cockpit and, being the sort of owner who prefers his plane clean as well as intact, took the battery out to keep any future joyriders grounded until he could inspect and clean the plane.
Then on Aug. 3, the plane had once again slipped its moorings!!??
This time it turned up at San Gabriel Valley Airport, another 18 miles away. Someone — or someones — had installed a fresh battery.
The Skyhawk had been flown multiple times, landed successfully, and returned to different hangars at different airports without a single camera capture or clue at any of them!!
“This plane just keeps disappearing out of the blue,” Corona Police Department Sgt. Robert Montanez told reporters.
“It’s just weird.” (A succinct statement that pairs well with the increasingly baffling facts on the ground.) Montanez added, “There’s no camera video, there’s no real leads as to who stole the plane.”
Hong has become part private detective, part air-traffic historian, using the FlightAware app to track the plane’s movements.
FlightAware can show where aircraft go, but not who was at the controls (possibly eating airport snacks and humming elevator muzak).
Whoever’s borrowing Hong’s Skyhawk appears to be proficient: “Landing is not easy, so they’re trained,” Hong observed.
So if you’re picturing teenagers hot-wiring an aircraft with a skateboard under the wing, recalibrate: the thief (or thrill-seeker, or rogue flight club) shows technical savvy.
They can taxi, take off, land safely and, yes, also replace a battery.
Locals at San Gabriel Valley Airport reported seeing a woman in the cockpit on multiple occasions.
She wasn’t lounging in the airport lounge sipping overpriced coffee; she was chilling in the cockpit during the day, which some found odd — not wrong, just odd.
No arrests have been made, no surveillance footage has surfaced into the public record and law enforcement is, according to available statements, stumped.
Airport staffers, perhaps tired of being unwilling extras in this low-budget aviation mystery, told Hong they would place the Skyhawk under 24-hour surveillance and chain it at San Gabriel Valley Airport.
The plane now sits chained, guarded, and glaring at the tarmac like a baffled golden retriever waiting for its owner to reappear.
So who’s doing this?
Amateur barnstormer? Environmentalist flight club protesting parking fees? A prankster with a thing for classic avionics?
Until someone is caught on camera, leaves a note, or the plane develops a taste for spontaneous cross-country trips, the mystery will stay a mystery and keep humming along in the aviation grapevine.
In the meantime, Hong has a birthday-memory story that’s somehow both infuriating and weirdly cinematic: an old plane, pilfered with surgical stealth, piloted by someone who can land gently and has better battery maintenance than obvious motive.
Call it the Skyhawk Caper: part crime mystery, part aviation rom-com, and all too real for one plane owner.
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