Military

DATE=9/28/01

TYPE=English Programs Feature

NUMBER=7-35361

TITLE=General Aviation Security

BYLINE=Ted Landphair

TELEPHONE=619-3515

DATELINE=Washington

EDITOR=Nancy Smart

CONTENT=

_

// ATTN: TERRORISM AFTERMATH COVERAGE, TRANSPORTATION, AMERICANA//

INTRO In the hours that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks on America, air traffic in the United States was suspended. Gradually, most passenger flights have been allowed to return to the sky. But the same is not true for so-called "general aviation," including small airplanes flown for recreation. VOA's Ted Landphair says thousands of planes remain grounded amid serious security concerns.

ANCR 1 In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the U-S National Security Agency dropped an invisible cone, more than forty-five kilometers wide, around the nation's thirty largest cities.

All general-aviation flights in and out of Washington and New York ¾ the two cities that were targets on September eleventh ¾ are still prohibited. Around the other twenty-eight big cities, pilots may again fly private planes, but only if they are instrument-rated, have submitted a flight plan, and are in electronic and voice contact with a control tower.

John Croft, a reporter for Aviation Week magazine, covers general aviation and is himself a pilot. He says an estimated forty-two-thousand airplanes whose pilots fly for fun or to give flying lessons remain tethered at small airports. That's because the pilots fly visually, when they feel like it, without necessarily telling anyone when or where they're going.

CUT ONE CROFT :07

"And for most airports, you don't even have to speak on the radio. You don't have to speak to anybody. You don't have to file a flight plan."

ANCR-2 That's precisely the problem, say critics of the industry. A small plane could veer into restricted air space, often under radar coverage, before a military jet could be scrambled to intercept it.

John Croft says the same would seem to be true of a hijacked business jet whose pilot had filed a flight plan, but . . .

CUT TWO CROFT :10

". . . air traffic control would be aware of what you're doing much sooner. They're keeping track of you much closer than if you were on just a visual flight."

ANCR-3 Early last week, Joseph Kinney, a corporate security consultant from Charlotte, North Carolina, published an article in the Washington Post that raised alarming security concerns about general aviation. Predictably, it also generated a flurry of angry responses from private pilots.

Mr. Kinney says that security is lax or nonexistent in most private airports. He notes that there are more than two-hundred-twenty thousand airplanes based at twenty thousand airports across the United States. Each, he says, is ripe for a terrorist's picking.

CUT THREE KINNEY :11

"I took a reporter, here recently, to our general aviation facility. And we could walk up and kick the tires on two Cessna Citations, and nobody ever challenged us."

ANCR-4 Thousands of airports are not fenced, and most airplanes are not even locked, Mr. Kinney says. He calls pilots "the last American cowboys."

CUT FOUR KINNEY :11

"They want to be unfettered. I've seen a lot of people who are extremely hostile toward the idea of being policed in any way, shape, or form."

ANCR-5 John Croft disagrees. It's not pilots' ornery independence that makes general aviation vulnerable, he says. It's their camaraderie and unspoken trust. He says the idea that someone would use an airplane ¾ one of the modern symbols of free movement ¾ as a weapon was almost unthinkable until two weeks ago.

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"Most people, if they got into an aircraft, wouldn't know what to do with it. So there really wasn't a big fear of people coming to the airport to steal aircraft. So a lot of airports didn't really concern themselves too much with security measures. For instance, the plane that I fly, we don't even lock the door. I've been flying for twenty-three years, and there's never been a need to lock the door on this aircraft. But with the terrorism actions, everybody's saying it's a whole new ballgame [world], where you have people who are skilled coming in to use your equipment for detrimental purposes."

ANCR-6 Security consultant Joseph Kinney agrees the aviation industry can no longer be naïve.

CUT SIX KINNEY :21

"If I load 900 pounds [400 kilos] of C-four explosives and nitrogen and other kinds of explosives, and if I fly it into the Rose Bowl [stadium near Los Angeles] with a hundred thousand people watching a football game, there's going to be some serious, serious destruction. There are going to be a lot of people killed and injured."

ANCR 7 Thomas Poberezny [poh-ber-EZZ-nee], is president of the Experimental Aircraft Association, which represents more than one-hundred-seventy-thousand people who design, build, and fly small aircraft.

Mr. Poberezny told VOA that while President Bush urges Americans to put their lives back together, that's difficult to do when the air above the nation is off-limits to twenty percent of the airplane fleet.

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"In a time of tragedy, when something as unexpected as what happened September eleventh happens, the 'what if's' start to go everywhere. And I could carry that argument to just about every factor of life, whether it's trucks or automobiles or whatever that can be used for nefarious purposes. I didn't see where Ryder trucks were banned from the road after the unfortunate thing that took place in Oklahoma City [when a federal building was bombed by domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh]. That proved that you can do substantial damage, also, with a load of explosives. So where do you start to draw the line between our freedom in terms of how much security we can afford to do in our lives to limit someone who has evil doing in mind."

ANCR-8 The problem with Mr. Poberezny's argument, Joseph Kinney responds, is that a truck cannot strike the upper floors of a skyscraper.

Earlier, Mr. Poberezny testified before Congress, where he quoted the American statesman Benjamin Franklin, who said, "If you give up your freedom for security, you have neither."

But John Croft at Aviation Week magazine says general-aviation safety will ultimately come down to a question of security versus cost. Like it or not, he suspects, pilots lost a piece of their freedom the moment nineteen men took control of four jetliners that September morning.

[signed]

neb/tl/nes