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I’ve been in professional aviation for over 17 years now and this is not the first time this has happened. During the 1980’s a South American Boeing 707 was repossessed while at the gate in Miami.

During the 80’s there wasn’t a week go by that somewhere in the south a big piston twin, King Air or light jet was not stolen. These planes were flown to Central and South America used to run drugs then abandoned on some field somewhere.

Africa is no different and the lack of traditional radar coverage makes it very easy for leasing companies to take property back. Also Africa has a high number of plane vandalisms and thefts anyways just recently a London based charter operator had two Falcon 900’s broken into.

Angola is a hellhole anyways I’ve flown to Luanda many times and each time we dump our passengers and then continue on south to Windhoek Namibia for the plane and crews safety.

But having said all that it would be a walk in the park of a would be terrorist to fly this bird away in the middle of the night and make some place like Chad or Sudan from Angola literally undetected by radar because less than 10% of the African continent has radar coverage.

Fortunately the Jurassic Jet is growing less and less common in Europe and in the USA so an old clunker such as this bird would draw attention if it showed up at an unusual airfield at an odd time.

If you were going to use this aircraft to attack an East or West Coast city, and assuming you could run the tanks dry because you had full tanks in the back instead of pax, how far away could you stage from?

I assume (hopefully) you could not go from Canada or Mexico because you would get caught.

Assuming the BGs have this aircraft, could they spoof a real (approved) arriving flight until it was too late to stop them?

Could they make it all the way from Algeria?

The Repo man strikes the operators of the big planes too:

"03/06/03 - Leasing company General Electric Capital Aviation Services Thursday seized a Boeing 767 jet operated by Varig and bound for Rio de Janeiro, forcing passengers to transfer to other flights. [General Electric temporarily released the aircraft late Friday after negotiations on the leasing agreement; Varig will get to use the Boeing 767 again, but will return it and five other planes to General Electric.] The Brazilian airline had 13 planes leased from General Electric. The seizure follows a similar occurrence at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport in January, when a Boeing 777 operated by Varig was repossessed by a division of insurer American International Group for lack of payments. Brazilian airlines are suffering from the after-effects of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and Varig alone has incurred over $746 million in debt. In addition, Brazilian regulators have found $359 million in accounting errors among the airline's financials, and have asked Varig to restate its financial results for 2001 and the first half of 2002. Varig announced last month that it would be merging with TAM, another Brazilian carrier." Leasing Company Seizes Brazilian Jet [Then Releases It]