The quote is from a link within the AVweb article.
As for what the author got wrong, basically what GA is. Yes, corporate and charter flights are GA. But he waves away the other categories. Most pilots do not fly around in corporate jets or light twins. Look up in the sky on any given day, and you’ll likely see a two-seat or four-seat Bugsmasher 150. Should we pass through a security checkpoint every time we drive our cars? Should we perform background checks on anyone we give a ride to? That’s pretty much what he’s calling for. Oh, but only for those damned richies who fly $30,000 airplanes.
If I wanted to fly tomorrow (assuming I was current), I’d have to be known to the FBO. Actually, I’d have to go be checked out by one of their instructors before they’d rent me a plane. If I had my own plane I’d have to be known to someone at the airport so I could get the security code to the gate. (And of course they’d have my information from having my plane based there.) I don’t have to go through a security checkpoint to drive a van into a parking garage. Passengers? Most pilots just don’t give rides to anyone who walks up. Passengers tend to be known to the pilot.
Basically the article comes down to two things: 1) Those rich bastards should have to be inconvenienced just like us poor people; and 2) OMG!!!111 A terrorist might knock down a house! And there might be a kitty in it! He’s manufacturing a problem that doesn’t exist.
You don’t even need to blow stuff up. I can think of at least one way to derail a train fairly cheap and easy, without needing someone to commit suicide to do it. Do that a few hundred times and you’ll be racking up the deaths and (more importantly) infrastructure costs.
Terrorists aren’t really a concern for us, despite all fears to the contrary. Most of them are happy to sit back and complain about how awful the rest of the world is. Of those who aren’t like that, very few are willing to die, and very few are among the leadership. In sum total, not a lot happens in terms of “terror” than a bare minimum to keep their names in the news.
Well, duh! That’s what TSA and the entire Homeland Security apparatus is all about. Oops, I forgot about the Department of Defense.
I too want rich folks to be just as inconvenienced as me when traveling. If that means you poorer pilots get inconvenienced too, so be it. It’s the price we must pay for stickin’ it to the MAN.
Lets look at transportation security. Anyone can rent a 20 ft box truck and fill it with explosives like Timothy McVeigh did. In fact, the first bombing of the WTC was done this way. No security checks, no expertise needed to operate the vehicle.
A small general aviation plane is more expensive to rent than a truck. A small 20 foot box truck is capable of carrying more weight than an expensive corporate jet. A company operating a corporate jet would inspect any serious amount of freight being boarded on the plane. Therefore, the real transportation safety issue is a vehicle that is cheap to rent, carries lots of weight, and requires no skills or weapons to control.
A few years back I was entering the Air and Space museum on DC. Out on Independence Avenue was a parked Ryder truck open in the back, with really large boxes and two guys in camo outfits moving among them but not seemingly doing something like loading or unloading. It was all suspicious enough that I talked to the security guard inside the entrance, who made some reassuring noises and said they would look into it. I moved away and then watched the guard for a couple minutes. He just stood at his post. He didn’t talk to anyone else, or use a phone or radio, so I knoew he just totally blew me off. Or maybe (but less likely IMO) he knew what was going on but didn’t bother to explain it to me. I doubted this because I know the museum has a loading dock and these guys would not be there to load or unload anything for the museum.
Anyway, it was all creepy enough that I just walked right across the museum and exited on the Mall side. Nothing blew up, and to this day I have no idea what they were doing, but it struck me how easy it’s going to be for the next actual bomber.
Whether or not that’s true, you’ll note that the article implies there is not enough big government restriction on aviation, and the people opposing the article say more shouldn’t be added. Neither side is saying there currently is too much big government restriction, which seems to be what you’re talking about.
It matters because it flies in the face of the the things our government tells us. Every grandma that wants to fly on a plane has to have her butt crack checked because of the oh, so slight chance that she might have something (what? Who knows.) hidden up that that might allow her to take over a plane and drive it into a building. Really? It’s so important that we suspend civil rights and invent new machines to see through clothes. Yet there are other people who also fly and have no where near the level of security as that. Why is that? Because the planes are smaller? Because corporations have said “Don’t bother looking here, TSA, we’ll police ourselves?”
Yes, the article reads like a condemnation of private aviation and a bitch about the rich. But, I think the people waiting in line for an hour for the orifice check have a valid right to ask what makes a private plane different from a commercial one. I don’t think the point is that private planes, or trains or vans, should have more restrictions. The point is that the security on commercial flights hasn’t stopped any terrorists acts because they clearly have plenty of other options which they haven’t taken.
Because the potential of GA as a terrorist tool is quite obvious. We ignore the danger as it has not yet been forced into the public mind. Once someone packs a GA aircraft with something nasty and crashes into a crowd, that will change.
It will not be a day to celebrate. Another bit of freedom gone.
So you’re saying that the danger is obvious, but we ignore it because … well, because so far it hasn’t happened, so it’s not very obvious.
I would presume that things should be tightly controlled that actually represent significant threats to national security and public safety. But neither Mr., Goldberg, nor you or anyone else so far, has yet demonstrated that GA is, in fact, a significant security risk, as opposed to the other areas where security resources could be spent.
Not to point out the obvious, but the 9/11 hijackers didn’t hijack eight-seaters at One Strip Airfield. They chose to hijack big jets. The reason we have security for passengers on big jets - not that it works great, but still - is that all the available evidence over decades of both aviation and terrorism shows that it’s the big jets that are a threat. Buying a ticket on a widebody airliner is easier and more potentially destructive than hijacking a Cessna.
Of course it’s theoretically possible you could kill people with a Cessna. It’s also theoretically possible, as has bene pointed out, that could you kill people with vans and trucks. In fact, that is a far more demonstrated fact; the Oklahoma City and 1993 WTC bombings were carried out using trucks. Trucks, hell; I could put as much weight in explosives in my Hyundai as I can put into a Cessna 172.
Mr. Goldberg’s article presents general avaiation as something as easily accessible as walking into a public library. Practically speaking, that simply isn’t the case. It’s NOT easy to get into a GA plane anonymously and to fill it with bad stuff and turn it into a weapon; it is much harder than getting on a commercial airliner, and orders of magnitude harder than just putting a bomb in a U-Haul. Or, for that matter, just walking up to a politician meet-and-greet in a parking lot and shooting everyone.
Here is one possible scenario that I would think would be the threat in general aviation – it does require some money and planning but I couldn’t say how much.
You rent a large private jet – not a little Cessna. If you have enough money you can charter a 747. You come aboard without going through a metal detector or having been searched. Once in the air, you pull out a gun and shoot the pilot(s). And then you crash the plane into… something. No bombs, just the plane, its fuel and its kinetic energy.
My questions about this article would be – what if anything is in place to prevent this?
I was thinking about this exact thing as I was reading through the thread. The answer I came up with is that your scenario still requires significant amounts of money, much more money than the “panel van packed with explosives” scenario mentioned above. If you are talking about a large air freighter—MD-11, 767, that sort of thing—they normally don’t take passengers. How are you getting your suicide pilots on the flight line? Also, I don’t know whether and how much cargo gets inspected for chartered freight, but I am guessing it’s quite a lot. The air cargo company doesn’t want to lose their hull and crew, after all.
From anecdotes of clients and co-workers who’ve chartered jets, space on a tiny executive jet—Citation Encore, Hawker 400, etc—was, ballpark, about 3 to 5 times the cost per person of flying first class. O.K., not too crazy a cost, but that still only gets you a plane around 15,000 pounds, moving at 450 knots. A worse impact than the Yankee pitcher’s Cirrus, but nothing that will bring down a skyscraper, IMHO. Moving up to say a Gulfstream IV, and you’re looking at 70,000 pounds and 500 knots. A big jet. Still not the ~250-300,000 pounds of a 767, but a G4 at speed is going to leave a very large hole in whatever it hits, depending on the target’s construction.
Here is a link to a jet charter company with their advertised typical costs. I have no experience with money laundering or illicit funds, but this seems like the kind of money that leaves large traces, unlike a credit card/fake drivers license for renting the panel van mentioned above. Also, your suicide pilots have to be presentable enough to the FBO and pilots to get onto the airplane, without raising suspicion. In a typical commercial flight, isn’t there a bit of anonymity/cover just from sitting with the other passengers? Still, Mohammed Atta, et al, did it and didn’t arouse suspicion until the box-cutters came out, so it’s not unprecedented. Perhaps large jet charter companies might be wise to march their clients through metal detectors and invest in bulletproof, toughened doors for their cockpits, I don’t know.
The same thing that prevents any other large airliner hijack. A steel door. Planes are chartered all the time for group outings. If you rent a large plane, you are catered by the pilot. The separation still exists.
Again, it’s much cheaper and easier to rent a truck than an airplane.
You mean like the transportation hazard of someone driving into a crowd with a fully loaded Dodge Magnum ? How is that different and what are you going to do about it?
See, that’s not obvious to me. A Cessna 172 weighs the same amount as a VW Jetta, and its useful load (pax, fuel, cargo) is somewhere in the 800 pound range. Compare that to a Jetta, which can carry 1200 pounds of stuff.
Far from being “obvious” what a threat it is, I would contend that general aviation is a very low threat. One needs a good amount of specialized training to hope for success, it isn’t going to make a big boom, and it is considerably harder to get your hands on a plane (even without TSA presence) than it is a U-Haul.
Furthermore, the 9-11 style attacks that have occurred with general aviation planes (the White House thing, the IRS thing, the Cory Lidel accident) are generally notable for being far, far, far more lethal to the passengers on the plane than anything else.
I think one has to get into really convoluted scenarios (what if a Baron did a dive bomb attack on an explosives shipment truck as it was going over the Brooklyn Bridge???) to foresee anything that’s a real danger to the public, and it CERTAINLY isn’t worth the money to station TSA agents at many hundreds of small airports all around the country.
So, I just don’t see the threat as obvious at all. It is a perceived threat by some that just makes no sense upon even a cursory examination.
I’m thinking that Osama bin Laden could probably scrape up the low-to-mid 5-figure amount needed to charter such a plane. And sure, if you’re going to transfer that money to a U.S. bank from Pakistan or Yemen in one fell swoop, somebody’s gonna notice, but if someone wires $2000 a week into the suicide pilot’s account, it can be done without a lot of rigamarole and traceability. The key thing would be a suicide pilot who cleans up well enough that nobody gets suspicious when he gets on the plane. And unlike the 9/11 hijackers, you don’t need to bring along a bunch of muscle guys to keep the other passengers in line, because there aren’t any.
So the pilot gets you into the air, you shoot him, then you fly the plane into the Chrysler Building with a full tank of fuel.
What happens to the building?
That’s the key question. Airplanes were blown up before 9/11, and we didn’t treat it like the end of the world. That’s why I’m not worried about minimal screening for ground-crew types, and why I think most of our security theatre at airports is silly. Hardening the cockpit doors and not allowing passengers to congregate near those doors takes care of the 9/11 problem, that of using the airplane and its fuel as a weapon against something else. The rest is largely excess, IMHO.
But here, we’re potentially back in the realm of airplane as weapon. Maybe a Cessna can’t do much - in fact, I’m sure it can’t - but how about that Gulfstream V?
A truck would rent for a few hundred dollars and do more damage. The reason airliners were used on 9/11 is because it cost them nothing to use. That is not the case with a corporate jet. You’re talking about renting something for $15/mile and funds are generally transferred ahead of time unless you have an account.
Beyond that, corporate jet operators don’t just allow people on their planes willy nilly. They can and do inspect luggage and screen passengers. Whether you know it or not, they interact with the FAA and are kept in the loop on security issues.
The most significant thing of 9/11 is that private aviation screamed bloody murder to the FBI about the terrorists and were ignored. All the scanners in the world don’t compare with common sense.
Of course; but the point is, a plane like that will take out an apartment or an office, or even a group of apartments or offices. It won’t take down the entire building.
There was also the case of Charles Bishop, the 15-year-old who apparently deliberately flew a stolen Cessna into an office building in Tampa in 2002. He killed himself, but there were no other injuries. I presume if anyone had happened to be in that particular office room when the plane hit, they would likely have been killed or seriously injured. Again, the plane didn’t remotely come close to taking down the entire building (whereas the large passenger jets hijacked on September 11 took down two of the largest buildings in the world).
Pretty much, yeah. A hijacked airliner can affect a) dozens or even hundreds of other passengers aboard and b) in a worst-case scenario, thousands of people in an office building. A Piper Cherokee (like the one used by Andrew Stack), Cessna 172 (like the one stolen and crashed by Charles Bishop), or Cirrus SR20 (like the one involved in the plane crash that killed Cory Lidle and his instructor) has the approximate passenger capacity and weight of my Honda Civic, and a somewhat greater speed (but not nearly to the extent of a commercial jetliner, whose cruising speed is an order of magnitude greater than that of my Civic). I think that much of the “security theater” surrounding commercial airline flights is silly, but that doesn’t mean I think we should start frisking everyone before we let them get behind the wheels of their compact cars.
