The Washington, D.C., ADIZ is eight nautical miles from AOPA President Phil Boyer's home airport in Frederick, Maryland.
In his book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, author Richard Bach, AOPA 200827, attempts to put forth the message "impossible is nothing."
His small story, first published in 1970, has had a profound influence on many of us to become pilots, or appreciate the "bird-like" freedom of flight. Bach, a pilot for more than 50 years, took the time, like so many of you, to file comments with the Federal Register refuting the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to make the Washington, D.C., Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) permanent. "I own two aircraft and fly often near and into Class B airspace.... It is no statement of courage that some government officials' very presence mandates that aircraft be grounded and inconvenience[d] for miles around."
Thank you, Richard, and thanks to the more than 15,000 AOPA members who have written comments to date, supporting the premise that this temporary airspace doesn't need to be made permanent. I have been most gratified by the fact that while the rulemaking covers only Washington, D.C., 90 percent of the comments have come from members outside the area. They, like Richard Bach, recognize that if it can happen to the Washington-Baltimore metro airspace, it can happen in other major cities.
More than 15,000 comments and still climbing — this sets a record as the largest number of individual comments to an aviation rulemaking in the last quarter-century. From student pilots to military pilots many members had excellent analogies and first-hand experiences that relate to the security and operational absurdity of this rule: "My car is a compact, it weighs three times as much as my airplane...consulting with a basic physics textbook will reveal that this means my car has 12 times the kinetic energy as my airplane." "Such an extensive 'airspace grab' by security minded agencies usually does not accomplish what they want. Just returning from the Iraq war I can personally tell you that cornering large spaces of land and airspace did not provide us with any added security."
While AOPA members and pilots were filing comments like these, your legislative affairs staff in Washington, D.C., asked for support in both houses of Congress. It came immediately from those elected officials who were pilots, and, as the November 2 deadline for filing came closer, other House and Senate members came to our defense. We asked them to write FAA Administrator Marion Blakey, and her inbox contains letters from prominent members from both parties. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) used his knowledge as a pilot to state, "No GA aircraft has ever been used in a terrorist attack; not a single ADIZ violation to date has been terrorist related, and finally the requirements of PL 108-176 have not been met." Inhofe is referring to a clause he initiated in legislation that required the government to report every 60 days on why the ADIZ was needed. Only one report has been filed to date, in direct violation of the instructions passed by Congress. Congressman Ehlers (R-Mich.), a member of the House Transportation Committee, put it very bluntly: "I have spent my whole career trying to convince regulators and my colleagues to get rid of rules and regulations that place substantial burden or pose an unnecessary nuisance without significantly increasing safety or security."
We have also asked that certain members of Congress weigh in by asking the FAA and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to hold public meetings, and in my conversations with the aviation leadership of the Senate I was able to obtain a commitment to Congressional hearings next year.
AOPA hired a professional consultant to analyze the economic impact of the security requirements in the D.C. area. They found that many airports in the ADIZ have been significantly affected by the security restrictions. AOPA's independently conducted study showed that small businesses dependent on providing services to pilots of light aircraft in the Washington, D.C., area are losing nearly $30 million a year. Hundreds of jobs have been lost, sales of aviation gasoline are off by nearly 20 percent, flight schools have closed, and many pilots have either stopped flying or moved their aircraft out of the area.
What's next? The FAA will take several months to summarize and analyze the comments in consultation with many federal agencies, including the White House. By law, the FAA has 18 months from the time it issues a proposed rule to make it final or decide not to act, but they don't always meet this time line. If the agency decides to move ahead with a final rule, it could do so by January 2007. That would be moving mighty fast based on the overwhelming number of comments.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his student Fletcher, from Bach's book, were not content to merely eat and sleep. They wanted like so many of us to become really good at what they could do — fly. Some 35 years later, what would Jonathan have done if flying meant Blackhawk helicopter intercepts, or being shot down? My guess is that he would not have given up, but would fight this with the same perseverance as you and your association are doing.
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