A Canadian man has been charged after a stolen plane was flown into the United States from Ontario in what authorities are calling a suicide attempt.

Adam Dylan Leon, 31, was arrested Monday night near a stretch of rural road in Missouri shortly after a pilot landed a stolen single-engine four-seater Cessna 172 following a six-hour flight over three states.

He was charged Tuesday with transportation of stolen property and illegal entry in the U.S.

According to the federal complaint, Leon flew the plane into the U.S in hopes of being shot down by military fighter jets.

The complaint also says Leon told law enforcement he was being treated by a psychiatrist.

Leon was being held in St. Louis by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tuesday afternoon.

John Gillies, the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation, told CTV Newsnet Tuesday afternoon that Leon was "composed and co-operative" while being questioned by the FBI.

"I think he was pleased that the flight was over . . . and he was co-operative with law enforcement," Gillies said.

The FBI has no information that connects the flight to terrorism, he added.

Gillies said it's likely Leon will be returned to Canadian custody to face charges.

Leon is believed to be a former Turkish national who became a Canadian citizen last year and changed his name from Yavuz Berke.

Pat Lang, the president of Confederation College, where Leon was attending aviation school, said he had not shown any questionable behaviour.

"He was described as being an excellent student by his faculty members," Lang told The Canadian Press.

A bizarre chase in the sky

The plane was taken from the airport in Thunder Bay, Ont., at about 2:30 p.m. Monday, according to Mike Kucharek, spokesperson for North American Aerospace Defence Command in Colorado.

According to reports, the keys were already in the aircraft.

Kucharek told The Associated Press the plane was flying erratically when it was intercepted at the Michigan-Wisconsin border by F-16s from the Wisconsin Air National Guard that were deployed by NORAD.

The pilot did not communicate by radio with the fighter pilots, nor did he obey their non-verbal commands to follow them.

Eventually, the pilot landed the plane on a highway in southeastern Missouri at Ellsinore, and taxied to a side road.

He is then believed to have hitched a ride to a nearby convenience store where he remained until police came into the location to arrest him.

When police arrived to arrest the pilot, he told them he had no identification, but that he was the person they were looking for. He was reportedly sipping Gatorade and waiting to be arrested.

The plane was stolen from Confederation College Flight School at Thunder Bay International Airport.

CTV's aviation expert Mark Miller said air-traffic controllers would have known immediately that something was amiss.

"Don't kid yourself, Thunder Bay is not a Mickey Mouse airport. There are scheduled flights in and out of there. It's a secure airport, and it's a relatively busy place, so as soon as that guy got in the airplane and started taxiing everyone would have been alerted," Miller told Canada AM.

Pilots flying into U.S. airspace are required to land at the closest airport that has a customs office. When the pilot failed to do that, likely at Duluth, Minn., authorities would have been alerted immediately, Miller said.

The biggest question, Miller said, is why the keys would have been left in the plane -- an almost unheard of practice, he said.

"Certainly in all the flying I've ever done, whether with flight colleges or renting airplanes, I've never seen keys left in airplanes, and that will be the big question, why were the keys left in that airplane.

"Was it an accident? But it's clearly to me a lapse in security," he said.

Madison, the Wisconsin state capitol, was evacuated briefly over fears of an attempt to attack the state legislature.

Maj. Brian Martin, of NORAD, said Canadian air navigation authorities first notified the air defence group that a plane had been stolen.

The organization then began tracking the plane, and eventually decided to scramble the fighters to get a closer look at the unresponsive plane.

Once it landed, the NORAD pilots returned to their home base and police moved in.