Below is the opinion of Declan, who has been in D.C. for 10 yrs and will be moving to San Fransisco in a few weeks. He is studying on getting his Pilots License too at D.C.:
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)
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