Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 6, 1994 TAG: 9405060110
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LON WAGNER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The Phantom said he'd learned his lesson.
"I just wish I knew then what I know now - what I've learned about how much problems I was causing," the Phantom, Rodney Bocook, said in a telephone interview Thursday. "Then I could have saved myself $500 and not bought the radio."
Bocook, 27, achieved national notoriety last August after he ordered an aviation walkie-talkie from a mail-order catalog, programmed it to air-traffic frequencies, and began broadcasting to planes taking off and landing at Roanoke Regional Airport. He called himself the "Roanoke Phantom."
Last week, Bocook was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison and fined $2,000 for broadcasting false instructions to pilots and using obscene language over the airwaves. U.S. District Judge Sam Wilson said Bocook's broadcasts were similar to "a person blindly shooting into a theater."
But Bocook said Thursday he didn't think his fake broadcasts put anyone in danger, because the pilots could tell he was "clowning around." In one of Bocook's early broadcasts, he invited the pilots of a ComAir plane to smoke a joint with him after they landed.
Bocook, though, said he wasn't high when he made the broadcasts.
"It's weird," he said. "When the FBI arrested me, I was getting ready to light some pot, so they might have thought I was high the whole time I was doing it."
The most difficult part of making the transmissions, Bocook said, was coming up with the money to buy the radio. Bocook paid $485 - plus shipping and handling - for his radio after seeing the mail-order company's ad in "Flying" magazine.
He programmed 20 frequencies into the transmitter's memory, just as a person would program a police scanner. He said he also had the option of scanning all 760 channels in the aviation band.
Shortly after buying the transmitter, Bocook went on the air. At first, it was two or three times a week. In the days before his arrest, he transmitted as many as five times a day. Federal authorities said that during the six weeks he was talking to pilots, the Phantom transformed himself from an amateur radio hack to a sometimes believable voice.
Federal authorities said pilots followed some of his instructions. If Bocook's directions had been followed on one particular occasion, a plane would have crashed into the mountains surrounding the airport.
Bocook said he found it hard to believe he fooled anybody.
"I got the impression they knew what was going on," he said. "Also, I got the impression I was getting on their nerves quite a bit. It seemed like I was becoming a nuisance."
by CNB