According to an Associated Press story, the FAA is missing key information on who owns one-third of the 357,000 private and commercial aircraft in the U.S. — a gap the agency fears could be exploited by terrorists and drug traffickers. The story notes that “About 119,000 of the aircraft on the U.S. registry have ‘questionable registration’ because of missing forms, invalid addresses, unreported sales or other paperwork problems, according to the FAA. In many cases, the FAA cannot say who owns a plane or even whether it is still flying or has been junked.”
About Janice Wood
Janice Wood is editor of General Aviation News.
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Hi Janice…Good topic! I’m glad to see that the FAA is going public and doing something about this vulnerability. I suspect that the security incident involving John and Martha King–resulting from the intelligence pushed forward to the Santa Barbara PD from EPIC–was something of a catalyst.
Cheers from the Alamo…Dave
Anyone who has worked with the FAA knows there are great people who work there. Those folks who do a very good job do it because that is part of thier individual values. As an organization, the FAA is about as disfunctional,apathetic and downright ignorant as you can possibly get.
I don’t accept the premise of the question.
The real question is just why does the federal government need to know if I own an aircraft. The local governments seem to handle the issue if taxes are involved. What is the justification for federal involvement ?
At Aviongoo (http://www.aviongoo.com/) we just posted an opinion article about the registration issue. Early in the article we provide a link that leads to city data for each of the supposedly missing aircraft.
We do not believe a bigger FAA is required to solve the problem. Our article explains that online updates from the field are likely to provide better and far more timely information.