Marcus Schrenker's Fall From Grace: How this Financial Adviser (Almost) Pulled off a Daring Getaway

• survival
• skydiving
• Worst-Case Scenarios
• Piper
• aviation
• law enforcement

Two days after burying his stepfather, losing a half-million-dollar federal court judgment, staring down the working end of two felony charges and at least seven additional lawsuits, and having his wife file for divorce, Marcus Schrenker got in his airplane. He filed a flight plan from Anderson Municipal Airport, northeast of Indianapolis, to Destin, Fla., where his father owns a home. Sunday evening, the plane slammed into the ground in Milton, Fla., 50 miles west of his scheduled landing spot. Schrenker, of course, did not.

Around 8:30 p.m. Sunday, just east of Birmingham, Ala., the chief executive officer of The Icon Group, and a few affiliated financial companies in Indiana, made a phony distress call, set the autopilot on his 2002 Piper PA46-500TP—a turboprop, single-engine Piper Meridian, N number N428DC—then parachuted in the pitch black. After hitching a ride with unwitting local police, he picked up a red, 2008 Yamaha street bike with saddlebags that he'd planted at a storage facility in Harpersville, Ala., and hit the road. Late Tuesday night, he was apprehended at a KOA campground in Chattahoochee, Fla.

Now, far be it for us to celebrate the exploits of an accused felon—but while federal marshals were performing a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in the area to find their fugitive, we had to acknowledge that D.B. Cooper-Lite chose one of the most audacious getaways we've seen lately. "This is certainly not something you see very often," says Hugh Teel Jr., who works for Connecticut-based Survival Systems, a training school that prepares fliers to respond to ultimate aircraft emergencies. "That's not even something we teach."

Schrenker took off around 6:45 p.m., heading south. The Meridian's Pratt & Whitney PT6A-42A delivers 500 shaft horsepower to the propeller, giving the 30-ft-long, six-seat aircraft a 260-kts (300-mph) cruise speed—and according to FlightAware's Live Flight Tracker, Schrenker's Malibu reached 24,000 ft near Murfreesboro, Tenn., around 8 p.m. Twenty-three minutes later, just south of Huntsville, Ala., Atlanta Center air traffic control noted the plane began descending more than 2,000 ft per minute, settling at 3,900 ft northeast of Birmingham, Ala. Here, Schenker made his bogus distress call to air traffic control, claiming the plane's windscreen had imploded and that he was bleeding severely, and he set the autopilot. Controllers reportedly attempted to divert the plane to nearby St. Clair County Airport in Pell City, Ala., but the Piper overflew that field. Schrenker was already gone.

Autopilot is a standard component of the Meridian's Avidyne avionics suite—but it's less than ideal for a getaway scheme. Putting the plane in a lake would eliminate far more evidence; indeed, the aircraft wreckage offered some of the first clues that his distress call was a hoax. "But you have to get out the door," Teel Jr. says. The Meridian's door is behind the port-side wing, about 8 ft aft of the pilot's seat. "He probably needed the autopilot on because if he's traveling light, he's got the plane trimmed out for straight and level flight, and then he starts moving around 200 pounds, or whatever he weighed, he could change the center of gravity significantly. The plane could start doing all sorts of unexpected things—and then he'd really be stuck."

Four thousand feet is an acceptable altitude for what skydivers term a "hop and pop"—jumping out of the plane and releasing the chute immediately—though it's not often done over forests and lakes in the middle of the night. Still, Schrenker was desperate, and he had a history of ambitious stunts. A video he posted to YouTube three weeks ago shows him flying an aerobatic plane under bridges in the Bahamas—which could also explain the parachute. Aerobatic pilots are legally required to wear chutes when they fly.

At an average descent rate of 1,000 ft per minute, Schrenker would have landed about four minutes later. The Meridian, meanwhile, maintained its south-southwest heading, at practically the same altitude, until 9:55 p.m., according to FlightAware. Then it began shedding speed and altitude just north of the Florida state line. Meridians have 4.2-hour endurance with full fuel; the last radar echo from Schrenker's plane came at 10:12 p.m., at a longitude of 30.63 and a latitude of -87.02.

Schrenker apparently thought he could thwart law-enforcement agents with his stunt—and he'd done it before. After 9/11, Schrenker consulted on a news series by NBC affiliate WTHR-TV, using hidden cameras to highlight security lapses at Indianapolis International Airport. He might have been impressed by the response to his mess.

While Schrenker floated to the ground, officials in Destin raced to the airport to prepare for an emergency landing. Meanwhile, the FAA contacted CONR, the Continental United States NORAD Region, and requested a pair of fighter jets intercept the plane. CONR scrambled a pair of F-15s from the 159th Fighter Wing out of Naval Air Station New Orleans, which found the $1 million Piper about 12 miles north of Whiting Field Naval Air Station. The jets deployed flares, and pilots found the door to the Piper open and the cockpit dark. Much like with the crash of Payne Stewart's plane in 1999, the fighters followed the plane until it went down—Schrenker's aircraft landing in a swamp on the outskirts of East Milton. The order to fire on a civilian plane, which was never given Sunday, would have to come from the Secretary of Defense (or other select military officials if he is unavailable).

Schrenker was apprehended Tuesday night, and airlifted to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital when authorities found he had slashed his left wrist. He is listed in fair condition and is expected to be released Thursday, at which point he will likely be transported to Florida 's Gadsden County Jail.

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