News Archive

PIN process at Fly-In shows demand for access to DC-3 airports

Some 200 pilots attended the DC-3 personal identification (PIN) process seminar offered at AOPA's Fly-In and Open House. Participants were able to consolidate the process required of transient pilots who want to fly into College Park Airport, Potomac Airfield, or Washington Executive/Hyde Field inside the Washington, D.C., flight restricted zone.

"This tremendous turnout shows that pilots want to fly into the DC-3 airports," said Andy Cebula, AOPA senior vice president of government and technical affairs. Cebula voiced members' concerns about security requirements reducing their access to airports and airspace before the Senate Commerce Committee Thursday.

The DC-3 were completely off limits to transient pilots from September 11, 2001, until February of this year. Transients are allowed back into those airports, but only after going through a time-consuming initial security review and being issued a PIN that requires multiple trips to the airport they want to use, a trip to their FSDO, and a trip to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

"Thank you for your presentation of the DC-3 process," one member wrote AOPA after the Fly-In. "I appreciate that you were able to save me extra driving trips by consolidating the process at the fly-in today."

Another member wrote, "Thank you AOPA for putting the DC-3 PIN meetings together...I think that this session both met a demand for people who want to fly into the DC-3 but find the vetting procedure too inconvenient, and also created a demand among people who hadn't really considered flying into the DC-3 a serious option before being presented with this opportunity to have someone explain and simplify the vetting process."

So far, only one week after Fly-In, more than one dozen participants already have been fingerprinted and begun their criminal background checks.

June 13, 2005