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
from as msnbc world headquarters, welcome to alex witt reports. we begin with breaking news as we await a news conference from police in mississippi where a pilot is now in custody after threatening to crash his plane into a walmart. he circled the skies for hours and instead landed in a field in north mississippi. the faa says only the pilot was on board, no word yet confirming his identity. it started early today after the pilot took off from to pull a regional airport. the police got word that the pilot intended to crash intentionally, the walmart was closed. that plane flew haphazardly for hours before coming down in the field where police swarmed it and made the arrest. here s our affiliate as that drama unfolded. we have been able to confirm, we have at least confirmed to us that it has crashed, that does not mean they reach the crash location. one of the difficult things about figuring out something like that is just how fast the plane was moving. at its lowest poi
tupelo airport has commercial service, typically an airport with tsa is very secure, fences, gates, you need a pass to get through many of the doors. that would explain how they were able to get out onto the ramp and get into an airplane like this. the big question is whether or not this person had any previous flying experience. they did a pretty decent job of flying the airplane, and more essentially, at low altitude for a pretty long period of time. but that will be a really interesting thing to know, especially if this plane ran out of fuel and both of the engines failed, rendering it into a glider, how they were able to make a safe landing, albeit maybe an emergency one, sara. so a lot of new details that you have brought to us, pete. one, that this person was an employee of the airport. two, that the plane was stolen. three, that the plane is now, and most important piece of information now for safety s sake, the plane is now down. and amazingly at this point, because that plan
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
aircraft and took off from the tupelo airport. we do know that pattison does have some flight instruction. we don t believe he s in a licensed pilot. it s ongoing to discover that. he s employed he has access to these aircraft. he is a lineman for tupelo aviation, which means he fuels the aircraft. we know that the aircraft was fully fueled the night before. at approximately 5:23 am patterson, from the aircraft called county 9-1-1 to tell them that he was going to crash the aircraft in the main walmart in tupelo, mississippi. soon thereafter, tupelo police department and fire department evacuated the walmart, and all the surrounding areas. we were assisted by the county s o. numerous major streets were