John And Martha King Held At Police Gunpoint (Really)

[nigelb]

I saw this and thought the names were familiar. They do the FS9 tutorial videos! Certainly a frightening situation for the Kings.

http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news/Jo ... 205-1.html

Nigel²

[jonesey2k]

Does seem like overkill to me. If you'd nicked an aeroplane would you file a frigging flight plan?
What I also find amusing is that somebody nicked a plane and 10 years later it still hasn't been found!

[Chris Trott]

Not to be political (mainly because it's factual) but this the result of something that was done by Clinton back in the mid-1990's. He issued an executive order that, among other things, prevented federal law enforcement agencies from being able to talk to other agencies freely. As such, they're still trying to get things back together (post-9/11) and figure out how to actually talk to each other again. Being the US government, this will most likely take until 2020 until it's fixed (unless intervening administrations undo the work that's been done to date to put things back where they were).

It's another reason that those of us whom are pilots have to be careful in everything we do. Somehow we (GA pilots) are seen as a bigger threat to public safety than someone hijacking a big airliner by most law enforcement agencies and politicians.

[nigelb]

Not to be political (mainly because it's factual) but this the result of something that was done by Clinton back in the mid-1990's....

Yea, it has to be either Clinton's fault or Obama's fault. Couldn't be Dubya's fault, could it?

Nigel²

[Chris Trott]

During the mid-1990's, several unwritten guidelines were written down and made more strict. This made it much harder for various intelligence and criminal divisions to be able to communicate. Several programs of information sharing were delayed or simply canceled because of this. Most had to do with foreign intelligence operations and the use of that information in domestic cases, but it also had the effect of cooling relationships between other agencies that had already been strained. The FAA had been trying to get a single information database with law enforcement since the late 1980s for just this kind of information sharing after several aircraft left the US and were used in illegal operations in South America and their status wasn't known by the FAA (thus they were unable to let law enforcement to know about the planes). There was a push in the early 1990s (under Bush 41) to put this in place, however it was dropped in the mid-1990s. If you want to see how bad it is here, I've found out about 4 incidences in the last two WEEKS similar to the Kings. One was a Meridian where someone had transposed the last letters of a registration number and the guy got stopped at gunpoint and detained only to find out he wasn't the guy they were looking for and he was in town looking for an RV. The Kings are just the first high-profile people to be caught by this problem.

[Motormouse]

Actually, reading the report, as posted, it seems the fault is with the FAA ( like our CAA they never get it wrong!!) for re-issuing the registration of a stolen aeroplane to a.n other, which is maybe why ---> http://www.ainonline.com/news/single-ne ... all-25550/

ttfn

Pete

[Chris Trott]

No, the fault is that there is no system in place for Law Enforcement to be able to get updates automatically to their databases when a registration is canceled and re-assigned. The FAA followed all proper procedures to cancel the registration 5 years ago and then issued it in sequence to Cessna in 2009. If you read this story here - http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news/Jo ... 205-1.html , it also has a link to the FAA database for the N-Number in question. Not only that, but apparently the aircraft and pilot had been detained BEFORE when it was flown by a Cessna employee to Wichita for some meetings.

The new "re-registration" system is to allow for automatic cancellation of registrations if they are not renewed and ensure that aircraft which have not returned their tri-annual renewals are definitely not considered airworthy (much as if your car's registration expires it's considered to be "un-roadworthy" until it's renewed). This was going on prior to this whole situation occurred as the FAA's database has become bloated with a LOT of aircraft which are still flying but they don't have current mailing addresses of the owners or other reasons that the tri-annual registration hasn't been returned.