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Yes: I see your concern. The question is what to do about it.

In one of the online viddie-reports, I saw some twit breathlessly revealing that (“It may surprise you to know…”) it’s possible to make that flight without filing a flight-plan.

Anyone who has ever filed a flight plan will instantly understand the complete horseshit in an insinuation like that,and I’ll tell you this: the political solutions that will pop into the minds of ignoramuses (“I know! Make everybody file flight plans!”) are the stuff of civic horrors in America. And they won’t think twice about it.

So. What’s to be done? (shrug)

Briefly: we can all carry on with courage, or we can make sure that nobody steps one foot out their front door in the morning without a nod from Big Momma GovCo.

I, for one, know where I stand.

“What’s to be done? (shrug) ”

I don’t have an answer, either. And Lord knows I don’t want the government to try and “fix” it. Had enough of that lately. But with any problem, the answer has to begin with “what can I do.”

Well, if you’re a pilot, how about locking your damn airplane? Sure, it can be broken into with determination, but I’m reminded of the guy I saw at a convenience store who left his Mercedes running while he came inside. When he went back out, he was simply shocked to find it gone. Duh!

Terrorists of course wouldn’t rely on simple opportunity to grab a plane. They’d recon fields shut down at night, and take whatever aircraft they could break into and/or hotwire.

So this is likely something that field managers and aircraft owners will have to take into account on their own, not via government intervention (besides, TSA clearly thinks this is no big deal). Each field/aircraft will be fairly unique in what it takes to add some security, or if it needs it at all (I’m not worried about every vintage Piper Cub out there).

But the reality is that when you harden one target, your opponent shifts to the next unhardened one. You can’t protect everything, unless you want to live in a police state. But in terms of available “weapons,” if I can’t get a 757, I might think about twin engine private jets for an attack.

Of course, while we’re wildly speculating, I’d also consider the possibility that you don’t even have to steal them, you can buy a dozen of those for a hundred mil (and Al Qaeda is rumored to have bought several large ships).

Talk about using capitalism against us.

you can buy a dozen of those for a hundred mil ***

. . . Rendering this entire discussion kind of pointless. Besides, getting a regulatory hold on G.A. airports seems about as practical as regulating people pulling out of their driveways. And probably has a similar net benefit. (I’m waiting for a Second Amendment nut to show up here any moment. He’d be more satisfied than a stopped clock at Noon.)
In any event, this stuff is becoming so mass-market that pretty soon any random 22-year old jackass will have a pilot’s license. (heh. )

More than anything else, our little blogstorm just proves that the internet doesn’t make crowds of people any more rational: it just helps them be irrational more efficiently.

.

***I assume you mean 757’s. You can get a used twin engine for the same price as good Honda Accord. (A new Accord with leather seats, woodgrain and a sunroof, but still.)

*** I meant a twin engine jet capable of 450 mph or more. I did quick math … how many $7 million Cessna Citations could you buy for a hundred million. But Zawahiri is reputed to be quite the tightwad, and would argue that their operatives did not need such a luxurious and modern twin engine jet.

Call it less than $10 million for a dozen used models.

And that last sentence of yours prior to the asterisks is destined for QuoteLog.

two in a month! cool!
This one doesn’t even have any typo’s!

I feel I should add something to this disccusion, if only because I’m another guy who did flight training at Briscoe (and started after 9/11).

The people that run FBOs (Flight Base Operators) aren’t the dimwits that they’re often made out in the media. But the business of training pilots, and of renting and servicing general aviation airplanes isn’t all that locked down, because if it were, it simply wouldn’t be feasible. The people at Advanced Avaition where I trained are good, concientious people, but they, like other FBOs, naturally expect people to play by the rules, and the rules for ground operations have considerable flexibility to be adaptable to local situations. The likely result of pushing significantly higher security barriers on these businesses by regulation would be that many, in an industry which already operates on thin margins, would go out of business. And that would be bad for many more people than just the weekend puddle jumper jocks like me.

Aircraft should be reasonably secured when not manned. But what, exactly, is “reasonably secured?” Most general avaition aircraft do have keys, or require some access codes to engage the flight management systems. But relying on keys isn’t perfect. So, I suppose we could require FBO’s to employ 24/7 security personnel to validate all access to planes. That’s a nightmare in both cost and complexity, but at least we’d have a goat to roast when the next dude with skillz socially engineers his way into the sky, and we’d certianly have a lot fewer places from which he’d be able to do so, as the small operators at small strips closed up shop. But if there aren’t lots of convenient places to land and service small aircraft, the utility of general aviation rapidly approaches zero.

Before we get to that, I’d suggest we focus a little more on pilot qualification. At this point, the major qualification for psychological fitness for private pilots, is getting your instructor to sign off on your training. That’s not a bad place to start, because most instructors don’t want to put head cases in the sky, and are pretty practical people with a big personal commitment to aviation safety. But I wonder how qualified they feel about making judgements about a person’s psychological fitness based on the training regimen for private pilots, and I don’t know that they get much specific training themselves on spotting people with mental issues. Maybe we could offer them some tools to help profile high risk students at an early stage, that has some transparency to students as well. If your flight instructor feels you shouldn’t be flying, and you can address the issue, demonstrate that it is under control, and will remain so, I don’t think you should be permanently barred from piloting an aircraft. But I don’t know that any test or checklist can screen for folks that simply lack judgement, as the perpetrator of this little stunt seems to lack.

I don’t want to see the barriers to becoming a pilot raised unduly, or the expense get beyond a point that most people could afford to do so. But I do think that it is fair to expect prospective and licensed pilots to demonstrate a reasonable degree of psychological fitness, in addition to acceptable physical fitness, in order to fly. There is some precedent to that in the regulations for alcohol use, but even in that pretty obvious area, even commercial pilots (who get a lot more scrutiny than low hour private pilots) still develop problems, and we know that some of them are flying impaired, if not to the point of being visibly drunk. It’s the intersection of human nature, and a creeping disease, and an activity that requires good judgement. I don’t know that there is a perfect answer, but I did find this article which talks about the problems in this area, even for professional air crew. The author basically concludes by saying that he believes the FAA should offer some better alternatives for professional pilots needing treatment for psychological conditions than its current stance of prohibiting operation of aircraft by people on anti-depressants and other non-imparing medications, because, all too often, the current stance force professionals to choose between treatment and their careers. And I know that in the world of private pilots, it’s a lot more likely that a person with serious but perhaps transient mental conditions is going to be able to successfully conceal his problem, and get into the sky. That, of course, says nothing about people like Atta, who may not be mentally impaired as we might generally understand it, but have non-rational (by most people’s standards) agendas.

So I don’t hold out hope that there is any perfect system for insuring that aircraft can’t be stolen or hijacked, and subsequently used for nefarious purposes. But we’ll learn some things from this incident, as we do from every crash and investigation, and maybe, collectively, the system will become incrementally “safer” as a result. It’s worked, slowly, imperfectly, but steadily for the first century of aviation, and it’s the best way we’ve found to approach these issues to date.

A perfect system? Why, we’re already almost there!

This article notes “Chris Dancy, a spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, said aircraft thefts are rare. About six planes have been stolen in the United States this year from a fleet of 211,000 privately owned aircraft, he said.”

If true, those are surprisingly low numbers. The kind of numbers that would make people think there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

fly stolen plane into a stadium and kill hundreds? why not just steal cars and mow dozens of people down… multiply that by 20 or so at the same time, etc. etc. it’s a concern, but let’s not over-react. there’s lots of ways to cause terrorism; sure i’m for requiring locks on airplanes but I don’t think we need to start requiring airports to require on-duty 24/7 security to lock down all planes, etc.

Apparently, the “robber” was the co-pilot….

The Top Headlines From AVweb’s Expanded, Illustrated News Coverage At AVweb’s NewsWire.

DETAILS EMERGE ON STOLEN CITATION…
After allegedly taking an unlocked $7 million Citation VII from St. Augustine, Fla., where he’d landed earlier as the co-pilot on a charter flight, police say 22-year-old Daniel Andrew Wolcott, a commercial pilot with multi-engine and instrument ratings, flew to Briscoe Field, near Gwinnett, Ga.. There he got on the phone to his friends and five of them arrived for the next part of the journey. Wolcott flew them to Winder, about 15 miles away, did a touch and go and returned to Briscoe, landing with about 500 pounds of fuel on board, according to a report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The next morning, Wolcott took a commercial flight to Jacksonville, hopped a cab to the St. Augustine Airport and assumed the right seat for the return trip of the charter.

http://www.avweb.com

So, locking it wasn’t really a option – he’d have probably had the keys, if he was the co-pilot.

I’m not sure where you get that parsing from the article

Quote: “After allegedly taking an unlocked $7 million Citation VII from St. Augustine, Fla., where he’d landed earlier as the co-pilot on a charter flight, police say 22-year-old Daniel Andrew Wolcott, a commercial pilot with multi-engine and instrument ratings, flew to Briscoe Field, near Gwinnett, Ga.. There he got on the phone to his friends and five of them arrived for the next part of the journey. Wolcott flew them to Winder, about 15 miles away, did a touch and go and returned to Briscoe, landing with about 500 pounds of fuel on board, according to a report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The next morning, Wolcott took a commercial flight to Jacksonville, hopped a cab to the St. Augustine Airport and assumed the right seat for the return trip of the charter.”

How could he have “assumed the right seat for the return trip” of a plane … that wasn’t there in St. Augustine, but was abandoned in Georgia? He flew as a co-pilot for another charter service.

Plus, the crime was initially reported when both pilots returned to find their plane missing. It’s also been stated he was a pilot (apparently for some other charter service), but did not have a rating or certification to fly that model of Citation … as a pilot or co-pilot. That’s why it was so particularly dangerous. If the slightest thing had gone wrong, he didn’t know the systems well enough to quickly respond.

Ah, you’re right.

I parsed “a” as “the”. As in he was the co-pilot for the citation, had taken it for a joyride – then gone back to cover his tracks.

“Plus, the crime was initially reported when both pilots returned to find their plane missing.”

Right. But I’d taken that to mean that he was one of ‘em, and “Hey! what happened to the plane?”... Sorry, I thought he was more clever than he turned out to be. :)

An update on the Georgia Tech Bomber, er, Blogger from the AJC

Michaels said Hollot was shopping for animal crackers “for the dorm” at a Publix grocery store near campus on Oct. 7 when he spotted dry ice for sale, something he had not seen in grocery stores in his native Pennsylvania. That is when he made the spontaneous decision to try what his professor had shown the chemistry class that morning.

He mixed the ingredients using different ratios of water to dry ice in bottles that at one time contained Coke, Sprite and Gatorade. The rest of his experiment involved dropping the bottles and listing for the “pop” when the bottles hit the ground. He retrieved the “duds,” except for one that rolled under a bush.

Michaels said he left that one, thinking the contents were inert. Plus, he didn’t want to get his pajamas muddy, she said.

So, to recap, what was described as a “terrorist incident” by one member of the Atlanta Police, and was then spread all over the web as such by bloggers, was in fact an 18 year old blogger spending his Friday night in his pajamas eating animal crackers and putting dry ice into bottles and dropping them out his dorm room window.

Lesson: when and if Al Qaeda attacks the US again, we won’t be sitting around wondering if it was actually an attack. There won’t be any doubt, just as there wasn’t on 9/11.

So stop it. Stop presenting each odd incident as evidence of a terrorist attack, especially based on first reports that are almost always wrong. All you do is scare the children, and end up looking foolish.