Getting back to the original question, maybe what is needed here is a good old fashioned campaign to promote new legislature.
I would say write the media and get letters published on the opinion section of newspapers or aired during newscasts. Possibly, you could make allies with some of the special interest groups that would like to see new state and federal laws enacted in the interest of keeping the public safe from General Aviation.
Thirdly, I would start a letter writing campaign to alert your congressman or senator regarding your fears concerning the lack of security in General Aviation. You may find you have more allies there then you think.
Our legislators are only interested in the public's best interests, so would it be too much to ask of them to provide some common sense law making regarding the security threat of general aviation. With the decline of violent crimes in this country over the past 12 years, many police departments are actually facing layoffs.
Could it be possible that we could use the resulting excess in law enforcement capacity in assigning these police to airport security functions? Creating an Airport Liaison Officer Program could help keep our skies safe and police officers in jobs.
Officers in the Airport Liaison Officer Program, or ALOP, would help keep our smaller and currently unprotected airports and our skies safe, by providing passenger and pilot background checks and aircraft screening, every time a General Aviation aircraft is intending to depart an airport. These officers would be on call and required to report to the airport no later than two hours after being summoned to the airport to render public services.
In the interest of General Aviation safety, luggage as well as aircraft would be searched as would the passengers and pilot. Biometric identification technology would be used to speed up the process of identifying persons boarding aircraft and would be cross referenced to the National Crime Information Center's computers.
Since drunk and drugged pilots operating aircraft has been such a big public safety issue as of late, the ALOP officer would administer breathalyzer testing before the departure of all General Aviation flight as well. In the event that time is not an issue, the ALOP officer could administer field sobriety tests as well. Drug testing would be at the discretion of the ALOP officer and will be administered based on acceptible and certified profile detection methods.
Once the ALOP officer has screened the General Aviation aircraft and passengers, the ALOP officer will assist the pilot in ensuring safety of flight by determining the airworthyness of the aircraft and it's appliances, ensuring that navigation charts and aircraft navigation databases are up to date and reviews the pilot's flight planning and navigation course before endorsing the pilot's flight plan for approval and issuing the required flight release.
) makes it clear that the airplanes were at max thrust and accelerating in the dive - speeds well above Vmo. It's a very interesting read - a lot of stuff which will never be reported by the news media in this country. They are more interested in doing Scott Peterson's trial.
