Or maybe TPTB want to send a message to Frederick-based AOPA. 
CNN is now reporting that it was a student pilot and his instructor, heading to an air show in North Carolina. Apparently a straight line between Lancaster and their destination took them right over downtown DC. You’d think the instructor might have noticed, even if the student was clueless.
And Papa T. works at Walter Reed and hear the fighter jets overhead, too. So he knew something was going on; fighters over downtown DC aren’t exactly an everyday occurrence.
What was the wind like over Washington? In a light aircraft it’s pretty easy to be blown off course.
The real terrorist attack in the DC area today is my office mate’s breath invading MY airspace.
Sound the red alert!
(Seriously, a flight instructor? You’d think he’d know they were charting a course over White House airspace…)
Inyokern is correct.
Actually, Edward, the quoted CNN article is right. FDK is the only one of the airports you’ve mentioned that is outside the Washington DC “restricted” airspace. (the ""s are because it’s technically an ADIZ, but I don’t feel like explaining the difference :p)
I know you’re probably just mouthing off, but I still find this comment, and silenus’, to be in remarkably poor taste.
But that side, this was an instructor and student? This experience along should be motivation enough for everyone to, you know, get a freakin’ weather briefing before departing, so that the briefer can inform the witless pilots about the restricted airspace. I’m glad I’m not watching CNN or Fox, the talking heads would have me putting my foot through the screen, calling for increased restrictions on general aviation.
How so? What is the Air Force supposed to do if someone tries to use a Cessna to attack something? Throw rocks?
The question is ridiculous, because a Cessna is not an effective “attack” weapon.
A Cessna loaded with C4 would be very effective. Not to mention a lot easier to acquire and learn to pilot, and easier to aim because it is so slow. Any airborne craft could make an effective weapon in the wrong hands.
And you’ll get a lot more C4 into a 20-foot Ryder truck (N.B. Oklahoma City) and cause a lot more damage. Last time I checked they were easier to obtain, easier to learn to drive than a plane, and move slower. Both times recently people have tried to crash single-engine Cessnas into buildings, the damage to the latter was minimal.
I get where you’re going with this, but sorry, the argument’s been brought up and refuted dozens of times, both here and by the AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assoc.), in their tireless efforts to fight unreasonable security measures.
I’m a pretty ineffective weapon too, but I’ll wager that I’d be full of bullet holes if I jumped the fence and ran toward the white house brandishing a wooden club.
What if it was an endangered hardwood?
Then they’d try to miss the club.
What the hell kind of plan is this?
So…we send a harmless dentist in a little plane over the White House, and then we send every single high ranking officer and their staff out onto the open streets.
Yep…that is one hell of a plan!
Homeland Security has thought of everything 'cause of course nobody would ever think to be waiting out there on the streets with Uzis or car bombs or rocks or plastic hand grenades and…nope - get everybody out of the building and onto those streets, now!
(Plus…you would think at least one Democrat would have been bright enough to lock the doors while they were all out and change the locks so we could keep them out!)
Dammit.
Back in 1994 someone DID crash a Cessna 150 into the White House, only casualty being the pilot. Back then the no-fly zone was exclusively the downtown Seat-of-Government area along PA Avenue and The Mall, from SCotUS/LoC to the Lincoln Memorial.
And later that same year, as described in that same page, some splendid specimen walked up to the fence of the WH and began firing, emptied his clip, and was tackled by civilians as he paused to reload (and just as Security was about to return fire).
…
Frederick, as mentioned, is not only just outside the “restricted” zone, it is also a major General-Aviation activity center so it would have plentiful resources to handle all the various paperwork, background-checking, airplane storage, etc. needs involved in such an incident, and state troopers and FAA/TSA personnel on station.
I remember that crash in 1994. That was one of the things that convinced me (long before I met all you GA people) that a small plane is effectively no threat unless you can actually get enough explosives or some sort of agent into the plane. The next was the thread when Miegs was closed and especially my own numbers that I crunched using basic assumptions in this post. This was shortly followed up by Broomstick generally agreeing with the basics of all my math and correcting/elaborating on my assumptions. (Whatever happened to KoalaBear anyway?) Follow that up with tests showing that a GAA basically bounces off a hardened target like a nuclear reactor cooling tower and I have no fear from something like a Cessna crashing, with or without explosives. Yes, I suppose an agent or even radioactive material could be used, but that seems like a lot of work for an uncertain outcome.
Funny thing–I was listening to one of the news feeds on XM while driving back to school from Annapolis. Just as they were announcing that the plane had been escorted to and landed at Frederick, I drove by the exit on I-70 which you’d take to get to the airport.
Hello?
Is it alright for a pilot with actual experience in Cessna 150’s to chime in on a few points?
Thank you.
First of all, this is a VERY small airplane. It is so small that a lot of pilots don’t like flying them either because they don’t physically fit into the cockpit, or because, well, they’re too small to make these guys feel comfortable. And it’s a very slow airplane - I’ve never gotten one over 100 mph in level flight even at full throttle with a less than full load. Two adult men? You’d be lucky to crack 95 mph.
A couple quotes:
Fantastic. I must make a note of this and find an occassion to use it, even if I don’t personally own a scrotum.
I have flown a half dozen different Cessna 150’s, rented in three different states. Not one had a GPS installed. One had no VOR’s whatsover. None had more than one VOR, unless you could by personal ICOM handheld with VOR capability. Most people do not carry such a thing, and of those who do, I am one of the few who probably actually knows how to use it.
So in a C150 you’re almost certainly using map-and-compass navigation, which means you have to keep a sharp eye out for landmarks. If you’re flying over unfamillar territory this can be extremely difficult, particularly for students or those who have become so dependent on GPS as to lose their map reading skills.
My most recent flight in a Mooney (a much more sophisticated airplane) involved a Garmin GPS navigation system that was supposed to indicate the Newport, IN TFR but it failed utterly to do so - so damn lucky we had a map with us and some brains or else you might have been reading about that flight.
Flying is not like driving in that there really is no road and no signposts - you have to keep an awareness of where you are in three dimensional space at all times. Also, you’re frequently a mile or more away from even the nearest landmarks, those more or less directly below you, and for the TFR’s you may be relaying on “signposts” 5 or 10 miles away. Human eyes are not really built to accurately judge such distances without aid.
They are working on pulsed lasers to signal crossing into the Forbidden Zone around DC… and IF they can make them work I don’t think many folks would complain too much. Part of the problem is that until the F-16’s show up there isn’t a clear, unambiguous signal that you have Seriously Messed Up. Pilots have been complaing for years (even before 9/11) about the difficulty of knowing just where, exactly, various airspaces begin and end.
I think the 110 mph belongs to the C152 - I’ve yet to fly a true C150 that can get more than 100 mph even on a cold day with just me aboard, much less with two adult men. The only way to break 100 is to use gravity to assist.
Also, the legal maximum take off weight is 1600 lbs. If they were over that, they can get penalized for the violation. Mind you, they will fly when overweight - just even more slowly than if they were legal, and the rate of climb blows chunks under such circumstances. Two of me and full fuel exceeds that 1600 lbs limit. Like I said, it’s a very small airplane.
Empty weight is 950-1100 lbs (variations due to things like what sort of instrumentation is on board, and the Aerobat version runs about 100 lbs heavier in the airframe) with most I’ve flown coming in around 1000 even. Add in at least 1 pilot at 200 lbs. That leaves 300 lbs left for legal loading - which would have to include fuel, leaving you with not much margin above that. You could maybe cram another 100-300 lbs into one and still get off the ground. Barely. You might have trouble controlling the airplane at the high end of that. Long story short - I’m guessing your average motorcycle could carry more weight in people+fuel+other stuff than a C150.
Let emphasize that would be under ideal conditions - about two years ago I flew a C150 in Tennessee that was loaded to about 1250 lbs (in other words, well under the legal weight limit) and could only manage 200 feet per minute climb and 85 mph as top speed. At which point I decided it wasn’t a good afternoon for flying and returned to the field as soon as possible.
You might use one for surveillance… but not as a weapon of mass destruction. Even a C172 has a bigger carrying capacity both in space and ability to lift weight into the sky, they’re more common, and they don’t cost significantly more (about $10-15 an hour more). It’s not impossible to use a C150 to cause mayhem, but there are so many other better tools for doing so out there I can’t imagine why anyone would use a C150 for such a purpose.
Actually, a C172 or Piper Cherokee/Warrior is easier to fly than a C150 (yes, I’ve flown all three types). A C150 is so small and so light that it gets batted about much more by the wind. The larger, four seat planes are heavier and faster, which results in them being more stable and less effort to fly. Again, while it’s not impossible to use a C150 for nefarious purposes there are so many better types for the purpose (and even the small four-seaters aren’t nearly as well suited to bombhood as sub-compact cars or rental trucks) that would be equally available to anyone with piloting skills that it just doesn’t make sense to choose a C150 for mayhem.
They’d want it to land outside the ADIZ/Forbidden Zone … and Fredrick, MD is about as close to the ADIZ as you can get without falling into it.
And yeah, sending a C150 into a larger airport like Dulles could interfere with traffic. It would be like someone skateboarding down a freeway - the speed differential between vehicles and the spacing required for safety could mess up airline schedules, for example. Not to mention that suspicious aircraft should probably be kept away from commercial air traffic. Much less disruptive to the public to force them down at a small airport, it inconveniences fewer people.
Well, you can shoot it down… provided the Proper Authority OK’s the action.
But beyond that - and F-16 zipping by at, say 400 or 500 mph (which they can easily do) generates a strong enough wake that a C150 will, at the very least, tumble and may well come apart in the resulting turbulence. Military aircraft at high speeds have done just exactly that, ripped apart airplanes larger and heavier than a C150, in unfortunate accidents that have occured from time to time over the last 50 years. The Air Force doesn’t have to fire a shot or even touch something as small as a C150 to destroy it, this is another case where “close” is good enough.
Well, yes, in one sense - but a compentant pilot knows how to compensate for winds of that sort. If the wind is so strong that compensation is impossible you shouldn’t be flying that day.
However, we aren’t talking about being slightly off course. That’s a significant deviation over an area of airspace ALL US pilots are aware is a Very Sensitive Area these days.
A student, being a student and therefore by definition not fully competant or fully trained, may be forgiven a navigational blunder, even one of this magnitude. The instructor, however, should have known better. There really isn’t a good excuse for the instructor allowing such an error near airspace of that sort. None.
We won’t get into the faux pas of a non-working radio (so they claimed) in such high traffic airspace so near Class C and B airports, which is *another * major no-no.
Great post, asterion. I think I remember that one the first time around.
And on cue, there’s Broomstick with an essay. 