Angry in the Great White North

A small aircraft is flying through American airspace, being shadowed by F-16s:

U.S. F-16 fighter jets are tracking a single-engine plane over Wisconsin that is believed to have been stolen from Thunder Bay, Ont., by a student pilot.

Mike Kucharek, spokesperson for NORAD in Colorado, told The Associated Press that as of 5:30 p.m. local time, the Cessna 172 was headed southwest away from Madison, Wisconsin.

Kucharek said the plane was stolen at about 2:30 p.m., and that the pilot was flying erratically.

He also said the pilot did not communicate verbally with the fighter jets, or immediately obey non-verbal commands to follow them.

The state capital building in Madison, Wisconsin, was temporarily evacuated when the Cessna approached.

This story has many parallels to the Mathias Rust incident in 1987, right down to the same sort of airplane:

After leaving Uetersen near Hamburg on May 13 Rust refueled his rented Reims Cessna F172P D-ECJB in the morning of May 28, 1987 at Helsinki-Malmi Airport. He told air traffic control that he was going to Stockholm, but right after his final communication with traffic control he turned his plane to the east. Traffic controllers tried to contact him as he was moving around the busy Helsinki-Moscow route, but Rust turned off all communications equipment aboard.

A comedy of errors followed that allowed Mathias Rust to penetrate Soviet airspace and land the Cessna in Red Square.

Needless to say, the American authorities aren't going to let something like that happen here.  On the other hand, the flight of the Mathias Rust had a relatively happy ending, compared to another story of another stolen Cessna 172.  In 2002, high school student Charles Bishop deliberately flew a stolen Cessna 172 into the side of the Bank of America Tower in Tampa, Florida.  Bishop was the only fatality.

The flight of the plane from Thunder Bay will end in a matter of hours, one way or another.