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Monday, January 7, 2002 - Web posted at 9:14:22 am GMT

Teen pilot in Tampa crash had "sympathy" for Osama

TAMPA - Police on Sunday gave details of a suicide note that appeared to show the lone 15-year-old who flew a light plane into a high-rise office block in Tampa was inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Tampa Police Chief Bennie Holder told reporters a note found on the body of Charles Bishop, who was killed on Saturday when the stolen Cessna crashed into a Bank of America building in the city, expressed sympathy for Osama bin Laden.

"I would characterize it as a suicide note," Holder told reporters of the three to four-paragraph handwritten note.

Bin Laden and his al Qaeda network have been blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks using hijacked airliners in which about 3,000 people were killed. Bishop was the only casualty in Saturday's crash.

"(Bishop) did ... make a statement expressing his sympathy for Osama bin Laden and the event which occurred on September 11, 2001," Holder said.

"At this time there is no information to support Bishop's connection with any terror organization ... all the indications are Charles Bishop was a troubled young man who acted alone without anyone else," Holder said.

He added that there was no sign Bishop intended to harm anyone else and said it was not clear whether Bishop "had in mind" the Bank of America building or the nearby MacDill Air Force Base as a target.

"The young man Charles Bishop is best described as a young man who had very few friends and was very much a loner ... a troubled young man," Holder said.

He noted that Bishop did not heed signals from a pursuing U.S. Coast Guard helicopter to land and flew directly into the building.

Bishop, an only child who lived with his mother in nearby Palm Harbor, turned up for a flight lesson at St. Petersburg- Clearwater airport, about 20 miles (30 km) from Tampa, on Saturday afternoon.

After being asked to conduct preflight checks on the plane, he took off in a single-engine four-seater Cessna 172 without his flight instructor or airport clearance. Bishop, a year short of being able to fly solo with a student license, was a student at East Lake High School.

He had been taking lessons at National Aviation flight school for about 10 months and sometimes washed their planes in exchange for flight time.

On Saturday, he flew for what National Transportation Safety Board investigator Mitch Wilson said was about nine to 12 minutes before crashing into the 28th floor of the 42-storey Bank of America building.

During his brief flight, Bishop violated airspace of the MacDill Air Force Base that is home to the U.S. military's Central Command.

Central Command is coordinating the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which Washington launched in October to hunt down bin Laden and al Qaeda and to dislodge his one-time protectors, the Taliban.

"We didn't feel there was any threat to MacDill Air Force Base at the time," Lt. Col. Rich McClain of the base told Sunday's news conference.

He said Bishop was in the base's air space for about one minute. The base asked the Coast Guard helicopter to try to intercept and contact the Cessna.

Officials have said Bishop ignored or did not see visual signals to land from the pursuing Coast Guard helicopter that had been on a routine Homeland Security patrol when it was alerted to the errant plane.

Two F-15 fighters were also scrambled from a south Florida base to conduct a combat air patrol, said Capt. Kirstin Reimann, a spokeswoman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

The fighters arrived in the area after the plane had crashed and returned to base when the Federal Aviation Administration advised they were no longer needed.

Referring on Saturday night to the Tampa crash and two other small plane crashes on Saturday -- near Los Angeles and Boulder, Colorado -- White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "None of these incidents appear to be related and there's no indication of terrorism."

Most of the Cessna fuselage dangled from a window in the Tampa office block for hours before it was pulled inside the building early on Sunday.

The incident was likely to raise concerns again about the security of private aircraft, especially at flight schools. Several of the 19 men identified by U.S. authorities as the hijackers on Sept. 11 lived in Florida in the months before the attacks and trained at Florida flight schools. Nampa-Reuters