Safer Skies? This Way.
USA Today continued their apparent crusade against General Aviation with their editorial of June 6, 2005. It's ironic that they chose this date, the anniversary of the Normandy invasion to advance the cause of freedom, to call for more restrictions on freedom.
They call GA security "lackadaisical" and they bemoan the fact we GA pilots are responsible for our own security. The fact remains the typical GA plane, weighing less than 12.5 thousand pounds, will do more than break a couple windows. Remember the suicide pilot in Tampa, Florida? The most he succeeded in doing was breaking a couple windows and killing himself.
Likewise, somebody using a crop duster for dropping "Bad Stuff" on a city would do little more than grab a sensational headline (no doubt used in turn by USA Today to further their cause of stifling the freedoms of their readers).
The fact remains all the major attacks by Bad Guys using airplanes has been done using large commercial airliners. They simply have the fuel load and payload capacity to cause the kind of damage they want. You want to try breaching a nuclear power plant's containment dome? You'd better get something bigger than a Citation jet (which happens to be heavier than 12,500 pounds).
USA Today claims "[u]ntil security for those planes is improved significantly, the risks of increased air traffic exceed the benefits to a favored few." Let's look at this one statement carefully (in context, of course).
They argue GA should implement the use of X-ray machines and other security technology. Of course, they offer no plan of implementation (practical or otherwise) so we're left to wonder if they'd require multi-thousand dollar X-ray machines at all the grass airports serving two-seater Piper Cubs.
Let's review again the events of 9/11. Four commercial airliners were hijacked, not Citation charter jets. Not Cessna 172's. Big, multi-engine transport category airplanes were commandeered for evil purposes, yet it's the small planes we have to worry about, right?
Meanwhile the gasoline tankers drive within blocks of the White House and immediately outside any number of government agencies and national treasures in the Smithsonian Institution's buildings. Where are the calls to inspect all the cars being driven into the city of DC? After all, my pickup truck can carry over 2000 pounds of cargo without even hooking up a trailer. That's a lot of capacity for explosives.
Shall we discuss another aspect of risk management? The US Department of Justice estimated there were nearly 49,000 carjacking attempts each year between 1992 and 1996. That's a lot of potential for somebody to capture a vehicle with a lot more payload capacity than a typical GA airplane. In fact, the weight of a typical GA plane could be carried by your average full-size pickup truck.
It still doesn't make sense to restrict the freedom of movement of us "privileged few" in our GA planes. This freedom of movement is laid out in Article IV of the US Constitution. While planes aren't mentioned there, neither are cars, trucks, or bicycles, but I don't hear calls for restricting them.