A Cessna 150 is one of the tiniest planes you can imagine: it travels at about 110 MPH and can carry only two people who weigh 170 lbs or less each. The plane itself is around 1,100 lbs with a thin aluminum shell -- perhaps a third the weight of most cars. If a Cessna 150 hit a large government building, the impact damage would be localized. People who weren't near the impact site might not even notice. As the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association notes: "The suicide crash of a Cessna into a Tampa office building demonstrates the ineffectiveness of a general aviation aircraft as a terrorist weapon." Yet one of these tiny Cessna 150s reportedly strayed into the controlled airspace near Washington, DC this afternoon and prompted a panic evacuation of the White House and the Capitol. Politicians, aides, and journalists were told by police to run from the buildings as fast as they could away. "Run, this is no joke, leave the grounds," a U.S. Secret Service agent told one CNN correspondent. But was this panic justified? By the time the buildings were evacuated, F-16s and Blackhawk helicopters seem to have been in the air and the Feds should have known that the threat was minimal. The area around Washington, DC is well-monitored by radar and security agencies should have realized that the plane was a small aircraft (the cruise speed of the Cessna is lower than the slowest speed at which large jets can fly). It should have a very different radar profile too. There's also a broader question about whether the size of the "controlled airsapce" near Washington, DC is too large and raises false alarms like this one. Contrary to popular believe, it's not just the airspace directly over the White House. I'm looking at the FAA's VFR Terminal Area Chart right now, and the "Air Defense Identification Zone" stretches from the *east* side of the Chesapeake Bay almost to the mountains an hour's drive from DC to the *west*. Any pilot who wishes to fly in the ADIZ must have an altitude-encoding transponder and open a flight plan. The Cessna was reportedly N5826G based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We don't know the all the details but it seems as though the pilot was heading from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, and a GPS-plotted course takes you right through the ADIZ. Older, pre-9/11 maps don't show the ADIZ, and that's led to a series of ADIZ violations especially in 2001 and 2002. What you won't hear on CNN or Fox News is that the ADIZ was supposed to be temporary. The House Transportation committee said in a report last month: "The ADIZ was never intended to be permanent. The committee believes that the FAA should not make the ADIZ permanent." It's actually pretty easy to become disoriented aloft (there aren't exactly marks on the ground telling you where controlled airspace begins and ends), as one pilot explains here: http://abcnews.go.com/US/Travel/story?id=748540&page=1 The post-9/11 DC area essentially has three layers of security: the huge ADIZ, the Flight Restricted Zone (FRZ) at roughly a 15 mile radius inside it (that can be entered if air traffic controllers tell you to), and a prohibited zone directly over the White House and Capitol. Details are still trickling in, but some conversations among DC-area pilots who were witnesses to what happened today suggest that the Cessna was inside the ADIZ but perhaps not the FRZ until the F-16s dropped flares to warn the pilot. If that's true the timing is odd: an FAA database lists scores of ADIZ "incursions" that didn't lead to emergency evacuations. Another pilot reports an ADIZ (but not FRZ) incursion as recently as last Saturday at the Gaithersburg airport, complete with intercepting helicopter and police, that led an arrest but no red alert. Some pilots are already wondering about the timing. Congress is considering legislation this week to fix the ADIZ (basically, to remind the FAA and Transportation Security Administration it was supposed to be temporary) and re-open Reagan National airport to general aviation. If the FAA and TSA wanted to derail the legislation, this line of thinking goes, exaggerating the threat from a tiny Cessna would be a great way to do it. -Declan (member of a DC-area flying club and a pilot-in-training at an airport inside the ADIZ) _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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