Two-seater airplane brings government to a halt: was alert justified?

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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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