A person is dead after a plane was stolen in Addison and crashed along the Texas-Oklahoma border Wednesday, the Texas Department of Public Safety says.
Investigators said a single-engine Cessna 172 was taken from the ATP Flight School at Addison Airport. From there, the plane was flown more than 80 miles northeast toward Paris.
The pilot crashed at about 8:15 p.m. into a field near the Fannin and Lamar county lines, not far from County Road 2180 and Farm-to-Market Road 79 between the towns of Telephone and Direct.
The DPS identified the pilot Thursday as 23-year-old Logan Timothy James of Stokesdale, North Carolina. James, officials said, was the only person on board.
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It's not immediately clear if the pilot radioed for help or declared an emergency before the crash.
James can be heard on an Air Traffic Control recording saying, "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."
Addison Airport confirmed to NBC 5 that the aircraft departed the airport at 6:53 p.m. Wednesday.
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Retired Navy Captain and aviation expert Armen Kurdian said part of the investigation will include determining why the plane went down and why James was flying it.
"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," Kurdian said. "And of course maybe some of the flight instructors at that school assuming he was actually attending that flight school as a student."
The Texas DPS said the National Transportation Safety Board is now leading the investigation into the crash and is being assisted by the Federal Aviation Administration.
