Dollars To Mackerel¹
CNN reports a local story: Authorities: Fake-emergency pilot under securities probe
(CNN) — A man whose financial management business is under investigation faked a life-or-death emergency in his private aircraft before secretly parachuting out and letting his plane crash in the Florida panhandle, authorities said Monday.
The pilot, identified as Marcus Schrenker, 38, later checked into a hotel in Alabama under a fake name and then put on a black cap and fled into woods, authorities in Alabama said, according to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office in Milton, Florida.
So there’s an idiot with a pilot’s license who has been ripping off his clients and he needs to flee. Given the details in the article, I find it hard to believe that people trusted anyone this incompetent.
I am more than a little ticked off that he endangered so many people with his stunt. The aircraft crashed in a sparsely populated area, but we are under a fire watch and if it had crashed a little sooner, it could have started a wildfire in the pine forests.
I hope they add the costs of the rescue effort to his bill. because two military chase planes is not cheap, but it was necessary with all of the air traffic in the area, both civilian and military. The effort in Santa Rosa County would have included a lot of people who took off work to help with their boats and dogs. We are not exactly rolling in loose cash around here, so this is going to hurt budget wise, although under county ordinances he will be billed for the response.
After trial, we’ll see how accomplished he is dealing with fish.
1. Now that tobacco is banned from most prisons, canned mackerel is used as currency.
6 comments
Just another small-time version of Bernie Madoff. Actually, reminds me a bit of the car salesman in the movie Fargo, Jerry Lundegard. Same stupidity, same idiotic scheming to get out of what he did. In a nation whose entire economy is based on ponzi schemes, this is just a stupider-than-usual one. Sigh.
– Badtux the Ponzi Penguin
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You would have thought he would have taken the time to get a reasonably good, fake driver’s license. Getting ID’d by a small town Alabama cop within a day, is not exactly a hopeful sign for life as a fugitive.
…I just read this story for the first time tonight, and I have to confess that I told Mrs. Jack K. that this was a guy with a certain amount of style, even if his actual planning and execution went a long way toward explaining why he was having so many other problems to begin with. Most people would leave a wallet and a suicide note next to some bridge railing, but this guy decided to fly to altitude and then bail out of what was apparently a perfectly good low-wing Piper Malibu…
All of the rest of the story suggests that, flying ability aside, he would best serve society by being permanently out of the gene pool. Still, I can’t help but grant the guy a couple of style points for trying (in a DB Cooper sort of manner), even though he deserves a few extra decades of confinement for creating an uncontrolled projectile by bailing out of that perfectly good aircraft. Smoke jumpers are allowed to do that; nobody else has the right to do so…
Jack K., the Grumpy Forester´s last blog post..If You Click "Reply All", The Terrorists Win
The thing is, he should have gotten the fake ID, and filled the aircraft with enough fuel to reach the Gulf, as the plane came down about thirty miles North of the water. Then he stays off the radio, because the chase aircraft were launched in response to the radio communications. If the plane went into the Gulf it would have taken a while to find it, and without the testimony from the chase aircraft it would have been assumed that he was in it.
He just didn’t think it out, but he’ll have a lot of time to consider his mistakes.
He should have taken an airlplane that would not look like it was bailed out of. A Malibu has an “air stair,” when that type of door is open, there is no way to miss it.
Had the guy rented a Skyhawk or Skylane, he might have been able to squeeze out the door and not had such an obvious problem.
I agree, get out near the edge of the ocean, dive out and let the bird keep heading south……then it would be free to come down provided it did not hit a watercraft.
After you get out of the coastal zone, there isn’t much traffic on the Gulf, so directly South of where the aircraft hit would be a good location. The door was indeed a problem, because the chase aircraft saw it immediately.
He should have paid more attention to details if he really wanted to disappear.