story from washington. pete, can you give us the latest on what we know, how long this pilot has been in the air, and what the danger is to the public at this point? reporter: well, sara, we know that this plane took off from the tupelo regional airport around 5:00 a.m. central time, 6:00 a.m. on the east coast. we re coming up on the plane being in the air for about five hours now. the plane is a king air c-90. you can see it there, that s a small twin-engine turboprop airplane. it seats between six and eight people. it can go about 250 miles an hour. the question now is how this will end, how this story will end. will the airplane run out of fuel? we ve been talking to sources who fly king airs and they tell me it can only fly for between four and six hours if the plane is fully loaded with fuel. that is the track from flighfl flightaware. you can see the plane took off from touupelo airport, circled e airport at a relatively low altitude, then continued northbound over t
on flightaware that this plane took off at 7:45 central time. that s according to flightaware. sometimes that data is not perfect. tupelo police say they received a call five hours ago. 7:45 central time, according to flightaware, is the takeoff time. so it s been some time. it s been hours. and i ve been talking to folks who fly king airs like this, and they say that most can fly for about four to six hours. so it s a possibility here that this airplane could simply just run out of fuel, which would essentially render it into a glider. the airplane s at relatively low altitude, at 1,500 feet. that s not a lot of altitude to use to glide to a safe landing spot. so now this is the risk here. where this airplane will land, will it go to an airport, will it go to a farmer s field, will it run out of gas or could this