Teen tried to steal plane from Fresno airport. So, just how easy is it to start an airplane?

A 17-year-old girl was detained on Wednesday after she tried to steal a plane from Fresno Yosemite International Airport.

The girl was able to start one of two engines on the plane (a King Air 200) and get the aircraft moving before eventually crashing it into a fence. Which begs the obvious question for anyone who’s ever seen an action movie:

Just how easy is it to start, much less steal, an airplane?

“It’s not not like a car, where you jump in and turn a key or push a button,” says Matt Thurber, editor-in-chief for the industry publication Aviation International News, who has been a pilot and flight instructor for more than 30 years.

A big part of flight training for a plane like the King Air 200 is just learning to start the engine without destroying it, Thurber says. There are battery switches and switches for the starter. You have to introduce the fuel at the right time.

A pilot may take a day or two of ground school plus several hours in a simulator to get it all right.

“It’s not a simple procedure,” he says.

“It’s kinda surprising that she was able to get the thing going,” he says of the Fresno theft.

You can Google these things, and there are no shortage of plane-specific how-to videos, Thurber says. But at that, the process takes several minutes and has multiple stages and can be complicated to follow. For someone without any prior knowledge of the aircraft, it would be a challenge, Thurber says.

“Knowing which switch to turn on is not apparent,” he says.

Plane theft has been a topic of some discussion this week, and not just in Fresno. Radio host Bobby Bones brought it up on his national syndicated show after a plane was reported stolen from an airport in Nashville.

That plane, a Cessna 172, had been moved to a different hangar.

This story was originally published December 20, 2019 at 11:19 AM.