The Sad Spiral of Frank Corder
In Washington D.C.
September 12, 1994
The “P-56” Airspace...
http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/WhiteHouse_Corder.htm
Around the monuments and federal structures of Washington DC lies the “P-56” Prohibited airspace, covers the U.S. Capitol building, the National Mall, the U.S. Naval Observatory (where the Vice President resides), the Pentagon, and the White House,
depicted on aeronautical charts with the letter "P" followed by a serial number.
And into the complex, one sleepy Monday morning, a drunk & stoned pilot would leave his mark by flying a Cessna where no plane had, and never should have, gone before...
Frank Eugene Corder was born on May 26, 1956.
At the age of 21, he started work as a trucker, a house builder, and later started a trucking business, Delmarva Freight, Inc., which specialized in hauling cargo from the Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
On Sunday, September 11, 1994, after spending an evening with his brother consuming alcohol and smoking crack cocaine, the 38-year-old asked his brother to drop him off in the vicinity of Aldino Airport in Churchville, Maryland. Corder walked to the airport and found the keys to a Cessna 150 airplane, registered as N1405Q, that had been returned to the airport earlier that evening after having been rented by another individual.
Corder never completed his pilot's license - Kesser refused to give him instruction after hearing from a state trooper that Corder had been "busted for drugs."
But – despite being high on cocaine - between his flight experiences with his father, flight instruction with Kesser, and the knowledge gleaned from building his own airplane in his parent's garage, Frank Corder knew enough about flying a small airplane to start the plane's engine at about 11:55 pm, and take off into the night sky.
Then, at 1:44 AM, the tower at National Airport began receiving radar signals that showed that Corder was flying at an altitude of 2700 feet, about six and a half miles north of the White House. Corder then started to descend, dropping a thousand feet in altitude over the span of three minutes. Then, the plane resumed a southbound course, passing over Washington Circle, and violating the P-56 prohibited airspace at 1:48 AM, flying towards the National Mall and continuing to descend.
Then, the plane passed over the Ellipse, located south of the White House, and dove directly towards the Executive Mansion at a steep angle of descent, its left wing was clipped by the magnolia tree just west of the South Portico steps (which was planted during Andrew Jackson's presidency), and impacted the southwest corner of the first floor of the Mansion's West Wing.
Corder's 41-year-old brother, John, said that Corder had expressed interest in Mathias Rust, the German teenager who flew a Cessna plane through over 500 miles of heavily defended Soviet air space and landed in Red Square in 1987.
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