Remembering the Sept. 11 Copycat Student Pilot Who Also Became a Casualty

On January 5, 2002, just four months after the September 11 attacks, 15-year-old Charles J. Bishop carried out a shocking act in Tampa, Florida.

Bishop was a student pilot at the time. While preparing for a routine lesson at a small airport, his flight instructor briefly stepped away during a preflight check.

In that short window, Bishop climbed into the cockpit of a Cessna 172, started the engine, and took off without clearance.

Instead of following a training route, he flew toward downtown Tampa and deliberately crashed the small plane into the 28th floor of the 42-story Bank of America Plaza. The impact caused a fire but structural damage was limited, and no one inside the building was killed or seriously injured.

Bishop was the only fatality. Investigators later discovered a note expressing admiration for Osama bin Laden and referencing the 9/11 attacks. Authorities concluded the crash was intentional, describing it as a copycat act inspired by the events of September 11.

The plane’s wings, which contained its fuel, were sheared off, and there was no fire in the unoccupied law office that was struck. The building had no structural damage, and city officials said it would be open to all but the most directly affected tenants today.

Law enforcement officials had no explanation of why the youth developed sympathy for bin Laden, and they spent the day interviewing the youth’s mother, Julia Bishop, at her apartment in Palm Harbor, north of St. Petersburg.

Neighbors and school acquaintances in Florida and Massachusetts called Charles Bishop an only child who had lived most of his life with his mother and sometimes with his maternal grandmother, Karen Johnson, in the suburbs of Boston and St. Petersburg. None could recall a father in the family.

The incident stunned the country — not only because it echoed a national trauma still fresh in memory, but because the person behind the controls was just a teenager.