Phil Boyer has spent a dozen years fighting for general aviation as AOPA president.
No date is more indelibly inked on all of our lives than September 11, 2001. We pilots and the rest of the nation watched in horror as four large Transport category aircraft were used as weapons of destruction. And those of us in general aviation are continuing to pay a public-perception penalty for actions that were out of our aircraft type, weight, and class categories. People now fear small airplanes and continue to focus on a perceived threat they think our aircraft present.
As 2002 began and your association turned to a new year, hoping that the aviation scars of September 11 were beginning to heal, you'll recall another tragedy, one that occurred on January 5. That fateful Saturday afternoon, Charles Bishop, a troubled 15-year-old, started up a Cessna 172 without permission, while instructors at the flight school he was attending at St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport in Florida were busy with other students. Bishop was supposed to be going through a preflight check of the aircraft. Instead, he flew over Tampa Bay and MacDill Air Force Base before committing suicide by crashing into a Tampa office building. The weekend-afternoon timing of this unfortunate suicide damaged one office, but no one was injured in the building or on the ground.
Those images of the tail of the 172 hanging from the building haunted us all weekend, as the media made a "near 9/11" tragedy out of this unfortunate incident. What a way for AOPA to start the New Year — defending general aviation and flight training. Naturally, our concern was that the Tampa suicide must not result in ill-considered regulations against general aviation. In all the TV and newspaper interviews I could muster, my message was that this event was "not a breach of security, this was an abuse of trust." AOPA was quoted in the New York Times and other publications, pointing out that this incident "unfortunately and tragically demonstrates what we argued before — a general aviation aircraft just isn't capable of doing much damage" and is not a security threat to the general public. Thank goodness for the Enron scandal, some three days later, moving the media feeding frenzy from Tampa to Houston.
Fast forward to this new year. It was January 5 again, and during the Sunday morning political talk shows up came a bulletin that a pilot had stolen a "Cessna" and was flying between buildings in Frankfurt, Germany, threatening to crash into the headquarters of the European Central Bank. This time a deranged, rogue pilot put on an almost-two-hour downtown airshow, with F-4 Phantoms and helicopters in somewhat helpless pursuit. As soon as pictures were received from Germany it was evident that this wasn't a Cessna that had been stolen at gunpoint, but a motor glider of some 1,600 pounds gross weight and carrying little fuel. The aircraft landed safely but another full day of pictures populated every news program comparing this act to the 9/11 tragedy.
At this writing, AOPA's communications staff is still answering press questions and giving interviews about this overseas event. Fortunately, the New York Times story stated, "The plane probably would not have done much damage to a major building ...." Perhaps we're making headway in letting the press know that a typical private plane weighs less than a Honda Civic and carries about 50 gallons of fuel — less than one percent of the 25,000 gallons a Boeing 767 holds.
This latest event came less than two weeks after Time magazine ran a promotional ad for its own publication showing two typical GA airplanes tied down at an airport, with two nuclear power plant cooling towers bellowing steam, and the words: "Remember when only environmentalists would have been alarmed by this photo?" AOPA quickly mounted a response campaign, asking members to e-mail the editor of the magazine, which many of you did. We learned that because of this action Time would not run the advertisement again.
Besides the media outreach to respond to both January 5 incidents, your association continues the constant uphill task of educating the press and the public as to who and what we are all about in general aviation. Oddly enough, January 5 of this year was the last day of a two-week campaign of almost 100 television commercials that ran over the holidays promoting our GA Serving America Web site ( www.gaservingamerica.org). Traffic on this member-funded Web site, which explains everything one would want to know about GA, has escalated 252 percent, with one day reaching a high of 462 percent over normal usage. AOPA's Airport Watch program was launched late in December, and each of you, as members, should have received a brochure that asks for your watchful eye when around airports. The Transportation Security Administration is funding sending the brochure to pilots who are not AOPA members (in my mind, there shouldn't be any) to cover the entire population. Two of the scenes in the Airport Watch videotape, available to all organized pilot groups, depict a pilot being forced to access his airplane — a situation similar to what happened in Frankfurtt. Airport Watch signs and posters are being prepared to send to a majority of the GA airports in the United States.
What January 5, 2004, will bring is anyone's guess. Hopefully, whatever happens between now and then will be viewed with a greater understanding as to the little threat small airplanes pose compared to other common things (such as rental trucks and fertilizer) that a terrorist or deranged person could employ.
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