There was a similar case in my neck of the woods, just West of Paris, where an inexperienced pilot got disorientated and entered the Class A for a brief period and interfered with a Falcon 50 that happened to be carrying the Premier Ministre at the time.
It got broad press coverage and the Pilot was jailed for 24H then got prosecuted and wound-up with a stiff fine and a licence suspension.
A decade or so ago two 80+ year old ex military pilots and long time friends decided to fly from the Isle of Man to the Channel Island in a piston single – no GPS. I’m not naming names as they were well known pilots who for years used their military training to skud-run run back to the island at 200ft, talking to nobody and negative transponder. Off-shore turbines would stop their game today.
They set off with one piloting and the other navigating. An hour into the flight the pilot says to the navigator, where are we? Then the pilot then noticed that the navigator had been quiet because he was asleep. Nudging the navigator, the pilot said, where are we. Don’t know, give me a minute. Time passed with lots of NDB searching and VOR tuning and they had a reasonable idea of where they were, that’s when they saw a BIG airport beneath them. They summised it was either Birmingham or Coventry. But it was indeed BIG so probably Birmingham.
They had a frequency for Birmingham but could not get a reply so they called Coventry. After passing their details Coventry said, could you be just south of Birminham International Airport. Yes, that’s us we think. Silence for a while. Fly heading 070, we need you to land at Coventry. I’ll give you vectors. They were vectored to Coventry, landed and were met by an official who said please wait, the CAA are on their way. A hour later they arrived, confiscated both the pilot and the navigators licences (remember they were both pilots) and they never flew again. They were fined a fairly large sum.
Hopefully, those pre GPS, pre wind turbine, pre mode S days are long gone.
I’m a big advocate of ADS-B out that cannot be turned off. No hiding without a transponder then.
And, I should have mentioned, Birmingham had to put several commercials in the hold away from the intruder causing all sorts of chaos.
I guess they weren’t the 80+ year old pair who crashed the Grumman Cheetah at Andreas about 10 years ago, then…
I really don’t understand the whole turning-the-transponder-off thing that seems to be popular enough that people talk about it. I’d rather be in a situation where I can be confident of my flight planning and navigation, and have Mode-C selected always, and there are more and more people out there with some kind of TAS device in their aircraft. (Something I thought about as I watched a Mooney zip by me in the Manchester LLR the other day…)
A decade or so ago two 80+ year old ex military pilots and long time friends decided to fly from the Isle of Man to the Channel Island in a piston single………..Hopefully, those pre GPS, pre wind turbine, pre mode S days are long gone
A decade ago there was plenty of GPS, and turbines around 
A decade ago i had a GNS430, no that’s 13 years ago!
Well I’ve turned off my Transponder in Arlanda airspace….
I had an electrical failure routing to Marihamn and about 50 miles N of Stockholm. I cut back to one radio and transponder and asked for a routing direct to Bromma where I hoped I could get the thing fixed. This took me about 10 mi E of Arlanda. Routing agreed, I asked if I could turn off the transponder as well. They agreed.
Then ATC said “do you have a mobile phone? What’s the number? If your radio fails we’ll call you on that!” And so I proceeded to Bromma, where on final the panel lit up like a Christmas tree as the power mysteriously came back of its own accord. Turned out to be a high resistance Alt circuit field breaker – a ‘safety’ feature!
Btw, I now know how long the radios last in the 172. About 30 mins out of El Paso the other day, the ‘Volts’ annunciator lit up. Volts were down to 24 although the so-called ‘ammeter’ had never showed a discharge in the weird Cessna system. A few flicks of the field switch brought it back on line. Sorry for thread drift!
There can be a problem with turning off Mode C: if you are flying Mode A or just non-TXP under the base of CAS, ATC has to assume you are below it.
This leads to a lot of clenched buttocks among ATC, especially in places like the Luton-Stansted gap where they have to assume the traffic is below 2500ft even if it is “about to collide” with an airliner.
That’s why Transponder Mandatory Zones are appearing (Heathrow, Stansted).
I sat through a NATS presentation on Wednesday. If they have do not have your Mode C they have to give other traffic 5 nm and 5,000 ft clearance, and they don’t know your altitude.
If your Mode C was on and went off during an airspace violation it can be regarded as malicious and slightly increases the chance of prosecution.
Lots of interesting stuff at flyontrack.co.uk
In the late 80s a student pilot got lost over Germany. He flew a long way and ended over Frankfurt. He said: I see a huge runway. They tried to tell him on which runway to land and repeatedly switched on and off the runway lights, but he got scared and landed on the other runway. There was a big report on Fliegermagazin, maybe Alexis still remembers.
I couldn’t find it online.
Imagine this happening today. He would get crucified.
Nope, that was before my time :-) But i might find it in my archive.
In the seventies, with the iron curtain in its most dangerous phase a Bavarian student pilot got lost in his C-150 … crossed the border to Czechoslovakia and landed on some field finally … If I remember correctly the flight school got the plane back after six months or so … It was pure luck they didn’t shoot him down.
