Cops Meet Couple in ‘Stolen’ Cessna

The story is actually worse than you reported. The original aircraft, a Cessna 150, had been stolen in Texas about eight years ago. The registration number was removed from the FAA records in 2005 and later reassigned to a new Cessna 172 built and registered to the Cessna Corporation in 2009. It was stopped as being stolen in 2009, with a Cessna test pilot on a delivery flight from one Cessna factory to another. That incident was supposedly, also "cleared-up." The King's, a world famous aviation couple noted for their aviation education courses, had been given the airplane in question, by Cessna, for the purpose of making training videos. They were stopped on a personal trip to Santa Barbara.

The original 150, was a two seat, small, airplane. The 172 is a larger, four seat, airplane. The record was supposed to be corrected years ago. The police could have checked the registration of the suspect aircraft with a simple, 60 second search of the FAA's online aircraft registry. The entire incident is a major screw-up and people could have been killed by nervous police with guns drawn.