DHS moves to tighten control over small planes, recreational boats

In a New York Times op-ed piece in 1996, populist-conservative commentator and one-time presdiential candidate Pat Buchanan criticized Steve Forbes’s flat-tax idea and said that it appeared “to have been drafted on the back of a menu, after a bibulous evening with the boys down at the yacht basin.” We are not taking a position on the flat-tax idea, but the boys down at the yacht basin, along with other recreational boaters and small-plane pilots, are not going to like a new security measure contemplated by DHS. The New York Times’s Eric Lipton writes that officialis from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Coast Guard have been talking to trade associations and states’ officials to see what would be their reaction to measures requiring the identification of operators and passengers in the millions of these vehicles which sail U.S. coastal waters or fly over the country every year.

Liption writes that boat owners, especially, have been protesting a proposed measure which would require of them to pass a proficiency test and carry a form of government-issued identification. “These are ill-conceived solutions that will inconvenience everyone and not result in a substantial increase in security,” said Michael Sciulla, senior vice president of the Boat Owners Association of the United States, which is already organizing to fight the proposals.

The impetus for the contemplated measure is the growing recognition that a private jet or boat carrying terrorists and explosive may well circumvent the defensive system, in which the U.S. government has invested billions of dollars, and which is placing emphasis on screening passengers on commercial planes and montiroing ship-borne freight containers.

By the end of the summer we are likley to see the first set of reules regulating safety measures on small planes. Passengers will still be allowed to board these planes without going throuhg X-ray screening or subjecting their baggage to such screening, but passengers would, for the first time, be required to undergo terrorist-watch-list checks. Currently such watch-list check is used only if the small plane is flying as a charter.

General aviation airports — at times not much more than a grass runway on the outskirt of a small town — would be required to conduct security assessments, and planes parked at these airports may be required to have ignition or propeller locks.

Kip Hawley, assistant secretary of the TSA, said the new security measures are aimed to ensure that unauthorized pilots cannot gain access to small planes and that officials know who is at the controls of a plane in flight. “We know which pilots own which aircraft,” Hawley told Lipton. “The next step would be to know who is on the runway in that aircraft.”

Pilots and the powerful organizations representing them say the measures are excessive and unnecessary. They poin out, for example, that a four-seat, single-engine Cessna weighs about the same as a medium-size S.U.V. DHS secretary is unmoved. “If we just need to be a little tougher,” Chertoff said, “we’re going to be a little tougher.”