Cool trainee saved day in plane scare
By Sara Kehaulani Goo and Sari Horwitz in Washington
May 16, 2005
The pilot who caused a midday panic in Washington failed to get briefings about the weather and restricted airspace and became lost minutes after leaving a Pennsylvania airport.
Hayden "Jim" Sheaffer, 69, froze when he saw a Black Hawk helicopter appear on his right wing while flying towards the White House last Wednesday, and panicked, Federal Aviation Administration officials said.
It was left to Mr Sheaffer's student-pilot companion, Troy Martin, who had only 30 hours of logged flying time, to take over the controls and land the small, single-engined plane at an airport in Frederick, Maryland.
The authority is expected to revoke Mr Sheaffer's pilot's certificate in line with airspace rules put in place in 2003. Mr Martin, as a student pilot, does not have a pilot certificate.
More details are emerging about what happened in the cockpit of the Cessna turboprop during the midday drama that led to the evacuation of more than 35,000 people from the US Capitol, the White House and Supreme Court. A log prepared by federal security officials shows how tensions escalated to the point where a fighter jet was "about to use missiles" to shoot the plane down.
Within hours of the scare, authorities had said that the pilots were lost and disoriented. But the account provided in Federal Aviation Administration documents show Mr Martin in a different light.
"It shows a tremendous presence of mind to be able to take the training he had and, under a very stressful situation, to bring that aircraft to Frederick," said Chris Dancy, of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which represents private pilots.
Records show that Mr Sheaffer failed to take the most basic steps required of pilots before operating an aircraft. He did not check the weather report before he left Smoketown, his home airfield in Pennsylvannia, and failed to check the "Notices to Airmen", which are required pre-departure reading for pilots to alert them of airspace restrictions. Had Mr Sheaffer checked the notices, he would have realised that the 3200-square-kilometre area around Washington is known as the Air Defence Identification Zone.
He also failed to contact the Federal Aviation Administration to provide navigation information to ensure the safety of the flight.
Mr Sheaffer became lost soon after departure, records show, and the aircraft crossed through three layers of increasingly restricted air space. Once intercepted by the Black Hawk minutes away from flying over sensitive landmarks in the city, Mr Sheaffer told investigators that he thought he had mistakenly flown over Camp David, another restricted airspace.
The aviation administraition also said that Mr Sheaffer was unaware of interception procedures and did not know how to respond once he saw the Black Hawk, police jet and two F-16s. The F-16s flew by several times, dropping flares to get his attention.
Mr Dancy said Mr Martin was probably about half way through his student training, as most student pilots take about 60 to 75 hours to earn their certificate.
If Mr Sheaffer ever plans to fly again, he will have go back to flight school and start again.
The Washington Post
. The card has two sides and represents two different things. Your medical examiner does not give you the right to fly, your CFI signing the student pilot certificate on the back of the medical is what gives you the right to fly. 
