Posted on 05/23/2005 7:04:43 AM PDT by IFly4Him
We're dumbasses.
ping
They're damn lucky they weren't shot out of the air.
If it was me, i would have kept my mouth shut!
Youre the blameless deity Ive heard so much about
Thank you for your Atoning sacrifice on the Cross for our sins past present and future
Regards to your Father and the Holy Ghost (sarcasm)
Seems like an easy set of circumstances to get into.
I wonder why the radio frequencies didn't work the first time.
Newsweek is reporting that the interrogators put their Flight Manual in the toilet.
OK - these guys honestly screwed up.
However - reading this makes me wonder why we can't use some of these resources (Blackhawks etc.) to protect our borders (southern in particular) from a known threat?
I had read an earlier report that claimed one of the pilots totally froze up (in fear?)so the other had to do all the work.
That was funny! There'll be pilot riots in small Pennsylvania towns.
The designation of the aircraft, C-150, may tell the story here. That's old. Very old. The new Cessna equivalent is C-152 and has been for a very long time.
I suspect this aircraft had minimum instrumentation. Certainly not GPS or anything capable of giving a preprogrammed warning of the restricted area. These guys were relying on maps and looking for landmarks in an unfamiliar area.
Their mistake was in underestimating the difficulty identifying landmarks in a huge metropolitan area. That was a mistake made before leaving the ground and it's not a big one. It's a small one that became big through mostly bad luck. Recognize that they could have drifted off course 10's of miles in any other direction and we would never have heard of them. It's an odd truth of low altitude flying that the less developed the area, the easier it is to visually navigate.
The old guy should have his ticket pulled and he'll probably agree. The young guy is a student and by regulation pretty much none of this is his fault. He will have gained better experience from this than any other student at 30 hrs.
And that it was the private pilot (the older guy) that froze up, and the student pilot who kept his head (somewhat) and flew the plane. Exactly the reverse of what you'd expect.
I was in DC a couple of days after this, and heard on the Chris Core show that Mr. Sheaffer will be paying a hefty civil fine, getting his ticket pulled for five years, and after that, if he wants his license back, he'll have to begin all over again as a student pilot. The student pilot was not legally responsible so he gets off easier...although I'd hate to see what his private pilot FAA checkride will look like. Think he'll get lots of questions on chart-reading to avoid restricted airspace, and TFRs?
}:-)4
I'm not buying it.
This is a prime example of how important NOTAMs & TFRs are.
I wonder if the next microsoft 200X flight sim will include restricted airspace, with simulated jets shooting you down if you don't obey? hehehe
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