While Jason Hong was celebrating his 75th birthday, he was suddenly thinking about the 1958 Cessna Skyhawk, the beauty of the colorful striped white and red single engine that he called his “old treasure.”
He won’t fly it any more, but given the opportunity he decided to visit the plane as soon as possible.
Hong headed to the Corona city airport after church on July 27th, but when he got there the plane was not where he left it. Hon was umbly.
“It was confusing,” he said. “I thought I parked it somewhere else, but did the airport manager move it? But I looked around.”
That was gone.
Hong was very shocked, but he initially didn’t know who to reach out to about the missing, stolen plane. He wondered, could someone jump out of it from an airport that hadn’t been noticed? How long have you been missing?
Questions have been piled up. However, the mystery deepened.
As Hong came to know, the colorful aircraft had simply returned to the airport, at least twice before, flying across Southern California by unknown pilots, unnoticed, on a series of joyrides or joyflights. Both Hong and the police remained scratched their heads.
When he discovered he had lost it, Hong reported it to the Corona Police Department. After all, who did he think would steal the entire plane?
Then, on the morning of July 29th, he received a call from Raverne police, informing him that his plane had been found at Bracketfield Airport.
“There’s an airplane sitting at the airport,” Hong said.
He was frustrated and barely took the time to handle what happened when he decided to pull the battery out of the plane and close it and head home. He thought the plane wouldn’t have started without a battery, and he could come back the following weekend when he had time to clean it and inspect it.
Except for that, when he returned on Sunday, August 3rd, the plane disappeared again.
Hong reported the plane was once again missing to the Raverne police, wondering what was going on. It wasn’t long before he received another call. This time, El Monte police told him that his plane was sitting at San Gabriel Valley Airport.
His confusion grew when Hong arrived there to inspect the plane.
“I found it on the battery,” he said.
It wasn’t just a heart that he realized he was confused by the plane that had disappeared and reappeared.
“This plane just keeps disappearing from the blue,” Sgt. Robert Montanes of the Corona Police Station. “It’s just weird.”
Montanes said he last saw the plane at a small coronavirus airport in May when Hong reported that the plane had been missing for the first time.
In the case of police, cases of an entire plane being stolen were so rare that officers received Hong’s report using the same shape as that used on the stolen vehicle.
Officers also recognize that the plane has been taken multiple times and has returned, making the incident even more confusing. However, Montanes said there were no immediate indications of who the perpetrator was.
“There’s no camera video and no real lead as to who stole the plane,” Montanes said.
After finding the second plane, Hong tried to put together details of the theft, but said the more he learns, the more he grows confused and confused about the situation.
Hong looked into the plane during flight, a site that tracks flights and aircraft, and on his 75th birthday, someone found a 51-minute flight that aired off from Laverne Airport at 51pm, approaching Palm Springs at one point.
A few hours later, on July 26th, a colorful striped plane was again in the air, this time beginning at about 1:30am on a short, 22-minute flight from Riverside County to Raverne.
It was the next day that Hong discovered it was missing.
At first, he thought it might be a random incident, but the details of the repeated incidents, he said, were meaningless.
Multiple flights indicate that the person who took his plane has undergone some kind of flight training.
“It’s not easy to land, so we’re trained,” he said.
Hong also found a headset on the plane and a new battery to replace the one he removed. In other words, this mysterious pilot spent hundreds of dollars on equipment to bring the plane back into the air.
Hong said the battery replacement suggests anyone familiar with the airplane mechanisms that appear to have tools and know-how on the type of battery they need and how to install it.
Hon said he was frustrated that his plane had been stolen. However, finding out that the suspect has spent money and equipment to use the plane and is back is just confusing.
“Someone will break into your home, are they looking for gems or cash?” he said he was trying to reason the situation. “But in this case, what’s the purpose? It’s like someone broke my window and then they put up something new.”
The fact that someone is traveling to another airport also baffles him.
A 75-year-old Yoruba Linda resident said he spoke to regular pilots and employees at El Monte’s San Gabriel Valley Airport.
“On and off, they came and went for almost a month without realising it,” he said. “This is a really rare situation.”
A regular at the airport said he saw a woman about 5 feet tall, 3 inches tall, in her 40s or 50s sitting on a plane multiple times. The man really remembered her clearly as he had a conversation with her at one point and often saw her sitting in the cockpit during the day, making him wonder why he didn’t relax in the air-conditioned airport lounge.
“It’s very strange,” Hong said.
For now, Hong took the plane at San Gabriel Valley Airport and said he would fly uncomfortably until he could be thoroughly inspected.
Other than that, he doesn’t know what to do to keep the plane grounded, or what to do to know who is secretly flying it out.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “That’s the weirdest thing.”
