Plane too close for comfort in D.C.

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), May 13, 2005 | by Eric Lipton

WASHINGTON -- It weighed about half as much as a Volkswagen Beetle and was traveling toward the nation's capital slower than police have clocked speeders on Interstate 95. But the fact that a single-engine Cessna could shut down all three branches of federal government on Wednesday shows that no matter how much air security has improved, the capital remains vulnerable to incursions by blundering pilots.

And as the wayward Cessna flew deep in restricted airspace, national security officials were on the phone discussing whether to implement the last line of defense: shooting it down.

The Cessna that prompted a frenzied evacuation of the White House, Capitol and Supreme Court veered away from downtown landmarks just before that decision needed to be made.

But it was a close call.

One senior Bush administration counterterrorism official said it was "a real finger-biting period because they came very close to ordering a shot against a general aircraft."

"How many more seconds away or minutes -- it was within a very small window where there would have been the decision," said the official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Such unauthorized flights into restricted air space occur perhaps a dozen times a week in the Washington area, government and aviation officials said Thursday, although the planes rarely venture as far as the Cessna flown by two men from rural Pennsylvania.

Since September 2001, military aircraft have responded more than 2,000 times within the United States and Canada -- officials would not release the figures just for the Washington area -- to reports of suspicious aircraft, redirecting fighter jets already in the air or scrambling them from bases nearby.

"Part of flying is knowing where restricted air space is and knowing how to operate," said Major Douglas P. Martin, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs, which helped coordinate the military response Wednesday.

The incident, federal officials said, demonstrates the need to communicate better with pilots who accidentally violate the air space rules, an effort that is already under way. In Washington in ten days, NORAD will begin using a system of laser beacons that they can point at offending aircraft, to get the pilots' attention and warn them away. Still, people inside and outside government agree there has been a significant improvement since 2001 in the federal government's ability to quickly identify and avert possible threats in the skies.

Pentagon officials sought to play down the incident, saying the small plane was not seen as a serious threat and did not come close to being shot down. Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse declined to comment on how close it was.

Brian Jenkins, counterterrorism analyst for the RAND Corp. think tank, agreed the threat from the Cessna was limited.

"The quantity of explosives that you can pack in a little Cessna is not the quantity of explosives you see placed in these big truck bombs," Jenkins said. "In terms of explosives, it probably could not do that much damage."

However, government officials also had to consider the possibility it was carrying chemical or biological weapons. A relatively small amount of either could have devastating effects.

"It appears the system worked as it was supposed to because the appropriate and effective secure measures went into effect," said Brian Roehrkasse, a Homeland Security spokesman.

Unlike Sept. 11, 2001, when the air traffic system identified airplanes that had been hijacked but failed to share that information with the military, communication on Wednesday was nearly instant, with authority passing from civilian to military and back again promptly, as circumstances required.

Contributing: Associated Press.