Today we looked at two quirky stories from the USA.
First off we looked at the case of the 10-year old who nicked his mum’s car and drove his sister 200 miles.
Later we heard about the fighter jet pilot who lost his plane!
I kid you not!
It just staggers me what children get up to these days, but a brother and sister aged 10 and 11, reported missing, were found driving their mothers car, reported as having been stolen, 200 miles from their North Port, Florida home!
The pair had managed to travel for more than 3 hours before being stopped by police in the early hours of the morning of 24th September at about 4am.
The report of the vehicle having been stolen resulted in a “high-risk traffic stop” alert.
Ordering the vehicle to pull over, armed officers pulled weapons believing that dangerous car thieves were involved so were said to be, “much surprised” when the youngsters stepped out.
In fact police only learned that the children had been reported as missing after they had been apprehended!
The 10-year old driver had been egged on by his 11- year old sister, who it seems had been upset by her mother confiscating some of her electronic devices due to bad behaviour. It seems that they had intended to drive to California – a distance of some 2700 miles.
Not sure that they’d have made that without re-fuelling, which I guess would quickly have ended their excursion!
The mother who owned the vehicle opted not to press charges but was forced to travel the 200 miles to collect her children and the car.
I guess they could be on the “naughty step” for a while.
So in the second hour we heard about the pilot who lost his plane!
After what he described as an “aircraft failure” an unnamed 47- year old US military pilot of an F-35B fighter jet flying over Charleston, South Carolina, ejected from his plane in poor weather only to land in someone’s back garden.
He and the house owner then called emergency services to attend to the airman who had injured his back, on top of which he had no idea where his plane might be.
In fact it took officials more than 24 hours to locate the jet which had continued flying for another 60 miles after the pilot ejected.
Fortunately the $100m plane crashed into a field in a rural part of Williamsburg County, about two hours northeast of a military base in Charleston, rather than a densely populated area.
It was not immediately clear how the jet had kept flying on its own for so long with no one at the controls.
Although normally tracked via radar and transponder codes, in the event of a pilot ejection, this type of aircraft is designed to erase all secure communication thereby hampering efforts to find where it went.
Whatever the failure was, it clearly wasn’t that disastrous if it managed to stay in the air for another 60 miles!
But hey what do I know?
Hope to see you again tomorrow so long as I don’t lose my car,
Scott
