The pilots of private planes and corporate jets haven’t had the opportunity to publicly embarrass Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano like the the Pennsylvania mule skinners did when new rules defied common sense. But they are getting their point across with thousands of protest emails.
Where the lapse in common sense in Pennsylvania only affected a few mule-walkers along a canal in a park, this new slew of TSA regulations, the Large Aircraft Security Program (Docket ID: TSA-2008-0021), would affect hundreds of thousands of private planes and pilots across the country and thousands of airports, not to mention the potential problems of screening another several-hundred-thousand passengers and their luggage.
According to USAToday, there has been an outpouring of emails protesting new proposed rules that will effectively affect every plane flown in the U.S. “Private pilots and business groups are assailing an effort to impose the first security rules on corporate jets, sending more than 4,000 protest e-mails to the Transportation Security Administration. The outpouring, including nearly 1,500 e-mails last week, represents the largest public opposition to an aviation-security proposal since the TSA was formed in 2003.”
These regulations would mean affected pilots must go through background checks, they would have to make sure baggage is inspected and each flight must be approved for departure.
Some of the provisions of this new TSA plan call for fingerprinting of pilots, watch-list matching of passengers before flights, creation of a security program that includes checking for unauthorized persons and prohibited items, creation of a security program for any airport that regularly serves large aircraft with scheduled or charter service.
These rules that might not at first glance seem to apply to smaller private planes, will have a severe spillover effect by clamping a new security system around virtually every airfield in the country, thus restricting access to almost every private plane in the nation from its owner.
TSA has no infrastructure in place to handle what could be hundreds of thousands of general aviation departures a day, millions of passenger background screenings and tens of millions of baggage inspections at thousands of airports across the country daily. Even if there were a system that could fulfill these requirements, the costs would be astronomic.
The Director of Aviation for Kansas, C. Edward Young, began to illustrate some of the most basic costs in a response to the regulation filed with regulation.gov.
If the security plan requires capital improvements, a typical security fence at an airport with 100+ aircraft and 6 jets (Reliever requirements) costs a community in Southeast Kansas $1.5 million. It was funded by the FAA, due to wildlife issues. If a fence is part of TSA’s plan, the cost for the 400 airports TSA is thinking about now is $600 million. The open ended nature of the regulation would lead me to place that number of airports at 1,500 or at least $2 billion, just in fencing.
For some states, like Alaska, air transportation is almost as important as automobile transportation. Planes take off and land 24 hours a day. They deliver supplies just like FedEx and UPS trucks do in big cities. They ferry high-school teams to away games just like school buses do in Kansas City.
Speaking of trucks and buses, the replacement of the word “aircraft” with bus or truck is probably coming in the future versions of these regulations. In fact many buses and trucks meet the weight parameters of this new TSA initiative. The plan applies to planes that have a take-off weigh of 12,500 pounds (with fuel); the average school bus weighs 22,000-32,000 pounds.
Following the TSA private-aircraft rationale, truck and bus drivers should be screened and fingerprinted, all the cargo and baggage carried on buses and trucks should be inspected and we should probably start screening all passengers to curtail the movement of possible terrorists.
The TSA approach would be laughable if there weren’t the possibility that the agency might actually attempt to implement these poorly considered controls.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
