As the sky began to glow, teasing misty details from the island’s steep, evergreen hillsides, the teen had busied himself with final preflight preparations inside one of Orcas airport’s private hangars. More than seventy small aircraft bed down on the island, and its single runway averages nearly 150 takeoffs and landings per day. You can watch the airplane action from the parking lot, the adjacent dog park, a spot just north called Smuggler’s, or from the woods behind the airport’s flimsy deer fence. You can also spy on the comings and goings from Orcas Island’s small sheriff station—known to locals as the cop shop—that lies within badge-tossing range of the runway’s south end.

A few days earlier, one of the landings was made by a 1999 Cessna 182 Skylane, tail number N24658. The would-be thief recognized that model on sight, just as he knew every Cessna, Piper, Beech, Cirrus, and other small plane. Regardless of its challenges with impulse control and social norms, the kid’s brain functioned as an aircraft encyclopedia crammed with engine ratings, performance stats, and avionics capabilities. Flying had been his one constant dream, one soaring aspiration in an otherwise bottom-of-the-barrel life, and he’d been teaching himself about flight since childhood, obsessively paging through airplane books until their bindings disintegrated. Now, at an age when most kids spent all their feverish energy trying to wangle a sweaty hour or two with another teen in a backseat or on a basement couch, Colton Harris-Moore’s one overwhelming desire was to spend illicit time in the privacy of a hangar with a plane he planned to make his own.