By URIAH KISER
Stafford County, Va. — Some say it’s hard to lose an airplane. Not really.
Stafford fire and rescue crews and Virginia State Police were called to the Stafford Regional Airport about 3 p.m. Friday after an alarm went out for what they thought was a missing plane. The plane, a small Cessna 150, took off Friday from the Manassas Regional Airport. The plane was reported missing after no one had heard from the pilot, said Stafford Regional Airport Director Ed Wallis.
Noting its last known location was over Stafford County, fire crews and the Virginia State Police surrounded the area near the Stafford airport but found little in the way of wreckage.
Finding no downed planed, Stafford fire and rescue crews called the Manassas and Leesburg regional airports and learned the plane had already landed safely in Manassas.
“This really was a comedy of errors. The plane was never scheduled to land at our airport,” said Wallis.
So what happened? No one at the Manassas airport was immediately available for comment Friday evening.
It is possible that the pilot landed the plane but didn’t close out his flight plan as required, which means only few would have known the pilot was safely on the ground, said Wallis.
Adding to the controlled chaos of the afternoon, many the the firefighters at the airport had just come from battling a blaze at a burning barn.
Flames from what had been a controlled burn in the 500 block of Mt. Olive Road got out of hand and spread to a barn, said Stafford fire and rescue spokesman Mark Doyle. Crews doused the blaze and no one was injured.
Some witnesses in the area who saw the smoke from the barn and later heard about the possible downed plane became even more concerned, but later learned the billowing smoke had been from the earlier fire.
Roads near the scene of the fire were closed, but reopened after the fire had been put out.
