Neal Boortz: Anti-pilot crowd flies off the handle

By Neal Boortz

For The AJC

About nine days ago a deranged pilot flew his Cherokee 140 into a building in Austin, Texas. This man had a long-running beef with the Internal Revenue Service, so he targeted a building containing IRS offices. One IRS worker was killed in the attack.

The full details were becoming known as I headed to the airport to fly my own private aircraft to Florida for some annual flight training. I knew this cowardly attack was going to be quite the topic of conversation, not only at our training session, but in the media for days or weeks to come.

Let me start with the idiot talking heads I heard on the cable news channels in the hours after the attack. (It was an attack, not an accident.) Of course we got the usual trip about flight plans. “The pilot didn’t file a flight plan!” one broadcaster wailed. I heard another news reader say that “since it was a single-engine airplane, a flight plan wasn’t required.”

Can those of us involved in general aviation ask just a small favor here? If you’re reporting the news, stick to reporting the news. Don’t start guessing about things you know nothing about. The number of engines on an airplane has nothing to do with it. A 747 can fly around the state without a flight plan.

And just where do people get the idea that there’s some sort of magic in a flight plan that would have prevented this disaster in the first place? All this man had to do was file a flight plan and take off! Is there some magic flight plan cloaking device that would have prevented him from flying into that building? Hardly.

Since the attack, I’ve noticed the letters to the editor in various publications. General aviation ought to be banned, they say. Little airplanes shouldn’t be allowed to fly over cities. Nobody should be allowed to fly a private airplane without Transportation Security Administration screening. Spare me.

For six years I served on the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport Authority. Trust me, I learned a lot about the anti-airport and anti-general-aviation crowd during that tenure. I’ll never forget a federal study on noise we did while I was there. The study determined that much of the noise that PDK’s neighbors were complaining about actually came from Dobbins Air Reserve Base and Hartsfield. The noise complaints really poured into PDK one particular morning: multiple jets departing at about 4:30. It turns out the jets were from Dobbins, heading overseas for Desert Storm. The anti-airport crowd actually tried to block the release of the study: It didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

Then there was the lady who complained of jet engines running day and night, which turned out to be a broken bearing on her swimming pool pump.

The bottom line with many anti-general-aviation types? Wealth envy. Would you be interested in knowing that the average value of a single-engine privately owned airplane out there is less than the cost of a new bass rig? Rich people my tail hook.

One more point about the attack in Austin. As the news reports were getting more and more alarmist, I called my friends at Angel Flight of Georgia. Angel Flight is an organization of private pilots and airplane owners who volunteer their time, airplanes and expenses to fly people in critical need of medical care to a location where that care is available. I wanted to know how many Angel Flight missions were flown the day of the attack. We estimated that 90 to 100 such flights took place around the country. So, while one crazed man was flying his airplane into a building, as many as 100 other pilots were each picking up a patient (usually a child) at some rural airport and flying that patient to a medical center for chemotherapy or some other critically needed treatment.

Just trying to put things into perspective here.

Neal Boortz’s column will appear every Saturday. For more Boortz, go to boortz.com