Flight School Fiasco: No Lessons Learned After 9/11
Thousands of foreign students are in U.S. flight schools illegally. Annie Jacobsen exclusively reveals an internal memo on the Transportation Security Administration's failure to enforce the law.
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Most remember the shocking revelation.
Six months after Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi piloted hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) notified a Venice, Florida flight school that the men had been approved for visas.
The two terrorists were already dead, and so were the nearly 3,000 people they’d killed. The INS was caught with its pants down. There was no way for the unpopular agency to explain itself out of its horrific and embarrassing failure. Yet INS spokesman Russ Bergeron certainly tried when he said, “It does serve to illustrate what we have been saying since 1995 — that the current system for collecting information and tracking foreign students is antiquated, outdated, inaccurate and untimely.”
The INS unit was disbanded and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) took its place in regard to monitoring foreign nationals for flight school eligibility. In September 2004 the Alien Flight Student Program went into effect, with TSA in charge.
Last week, in one of the most damaging reports on the TSA to date, ABC News revealed that in the program’s first year under TSA control, there were “some 8,000 foreign students in the FAA database who got their pilot licenses without ever being approved by the TSA.”
“Thousands of aliens, some of whom may very well pose a threat to this country, are taking flight lessons, being granted FAA certifications and are flying planes,” wrote TSA official Richard A. Horn in 2005, according to ABC. He was complaining that the students did not have the proper visas.
ABC also cited a former FAA inspector who tried to blow the whistle on the disaster waiting to happen, as documented on its website.
In addition, Pajamas Media has obtained an internal TSA memo — dated and stamped nine months after the FAA inspectors initially blew the whistle — which reveals that the current level of ineptitude inside the TSA is hauntingly similar to that of the INS on 9/11. [See the memo below]
TSA officials are wholly aware of major inaccuracies in the foreign flight school program and are promoting a do-nothing policy behind the scenes.
The memo from Acting General Manager for General Aviation Robert Rottman states:
- TSA is in charge of the foreign flight student program
- Department of State (DOS) creates visa policy
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforces visa requirements
- TSA employees are confused by “conflicting and ambiguous” policies
- TSA officials “abstain” from taking any corrective action
“To date, the information received from the various agencies has been conflicting and ambiguous and has led to confusion and inconsistent application,” TSA’s Rottman writes. Hardly comforting words from an agency assigned to turn around the INS’s deadly internal confusion. Rottman made the TSA’s do-nothing policy painfully clear:
Currently DOS and ICE appear to have conflicting views on the appropriateness of B visas for flight training. Department of State, which has the responsibility for development of visa policy, contends that a B visa is appropriate for flight training. However, ICE, which enforces visa requirements, has asserted that B visas are not appropriate for flight training.
Rottman’s conclusion: “Based on the forgoing, TSA representatives having security inspection responsibility and oversight authority…will abstain from making visa appropriate or validity determinations until further notice, as appropriate.” In other words, if a foreign flight student has a B visa, which one agency says is okay but another agency says is not okay, TSA will look the other way.
Several days after the ABC story broke, Senator Charles Schumer held a Sunday afternoon press conference and demanded that the TSA be audited. Schumer called the TSA’s performance “spotty and inadequate.”
Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles “Chic” Burlingame III was the pilot on American Airlines flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon, thinks a TSA audit is not enough.
“The situation is serious enough that an audit is not sufficient,” Burlingame told Pajamas Media. “One of TSA’s own flight school program overseers, Rick Horn, was concerned enough to go to the media, clearly because his own agency was unresponsive. This security breach is too serious to let the TSA investigate itself. The TSA’s track record doesn’t instill confidence that it is competent to investigate itself.”
Burlingame, whose articles and op-ed pieces on aviation security and public policy appear frequently in the Wall Street Journal, believes Senator Schumer should demand an immediate independent investigation.
Burlingame raised another important question, this one involving the players in TSA’s newest security failure. The memo obtained by Pajamas Media was addressed to Security Operations Assistant Administrator Mike Restovich — the same individual involved in a highly public TSA security cheating scandal last fall.
Restovich is the TSA official who was caught tipping off airport security directors about undercover bomb tests, essentially encouraging TSA airport directors to cheat. Associated Press reporter Eileen Sullivan broke the story, which resulted in Congressional hearings on the matter.
Chief Kip Hawley and Mike Restovich were ordered to testify, but only Hawley showed up. “Kip Hawley refused to explain the details of that incident to members of Congress,” Burlingame reminded this reporter when questioned about Restovich’s actions. She added: “Hawley told them TSA was investigating the matter. We’re still waiting for answers.”
So where was Mike Restovich if he wasn’t answering to Congress like he was ordered to? He was sent to London on what one TSA employee told Pajamas Media amounted to “a cushy TSA job, overseas and out of sight.” Indeed, 29 days after the cheating scandal broke, Restovich began his new job as the DHS Attaché to the United Kingdom.
With a Congress that demands answers but forgets about follow-ups, TSA’s performances — be they tragedies in security or comedies about ethics — continue to roll along unfettered. Neither TSA, nor its parent agency DHS, would provide comment for ABC News on the flight school story.
However, after the piece was published, TSA posted a dubious response on its website. The heading “myth busters” suggested that TSA was the victim of some unfortunate social phenomenon that spins tales from whole cloth. The post contains some of the most oblique language available to an English speaker:
Each and every foreign national that applies for flight training at any FAA-certified school anywhere in the world is checked by TSA prior to beginning that training.
But what does “is checked” actually mean? Has TSA taken a page from the Bill Clinton playbook, and does “is checked” now depend on what the meaning of the word “is” is?
“If TSA was conducting an STA [Security Threat Assessment] and discovered a foreign flight student had a B-visa what would it do?” Pajamas Media asked TSA headquarters in an email.
A TSA official spokesman responded: “TSA conducts a battery of checks that address aviation security issues and potential vulnerabilities. In addition to our checks, we work closely with our DHS sister agency responsible to immigration law, ICE.”
To which this reporter wrote in an email, “How come you are not answering my question?”
To which the TSA spokesman responded, “I did.”
A reaction to that response is dependent on how one defines the word “did.”
Annie Jacobsen writes about aviation security and homeland security for a variety of newspapers, magazines and blogs. She is the author of the book, Terror in The Skies, Why 9/11 Could Happen Again.
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17 Comments
1. spinoneone:There are two or three visa categories which could be used for this program. The B-1/B-2 visa is for business and/or tourist travel to the US and allows a stay of up to six months. If the flight instruction is given as an “up grade” to a current flight certificate as part of a pilot’s current employment, that would be acceptable.
For initial training an F-1 student visa would be more appropriate. This allows the student to stay in the US for a year, renewable, and also requires checks of his financial and security status. This is the visa that should be used for any pilot or would-be pilot coming to the US for training on his own responsibility.
Under some unusual circumstances, a J-1 “exchange visitor” or H-1 “temporary worker” visa might be appropriate.
In any event, it seems obvious that TSA/ICE aren’t doing their jobs very well. No surprise since they used to be call “The Immigration and Naturalization Service” of past renown.
Mar 6, 2008 - 3:36 am 2. Sam:Does any part of the government besides the military actually work well?
Yeah, lets put the government in charge of the healthcare system next!
Mar 6, 2008 - 6:08 am 3. Croisan:My God! Push hard on this one. The TSA approach, if true, (and it certainly sounds like it is) cannot be allowed to stand!
Mar 6, 2008 - 6:14 am 4. Don:The candidates need to pick this up as issue too. Both McCain and Obama/Clinton. This is one all of us should be VERY concerned about. Good work.
TSA is too busy shaking down active duty military personnel and other tax-paying US citizens for oversized tubes of toothpaste at airport screening points to do anything about terrorists with ATP’s or PPL’s.
Sheesh.
——
*also http://www.ocblog.net/ocblog/2007/09/oakland-airport.html
Mar 6, 2008 - 6:25 am 5. holdfast:The US Government is just completely f**ked - even the defence department doesn’t really work very well, though actual military formations seem to work fine (not perfectly, that’s not possible for mere mortals) and their operational efficiency seems to increase in direct correlation with their distance from Washington. I think that the US and its government may have simply gotten too big to operate properly.
Mar 6, 2008 - 6:40 am 6. Gustave:In all honesty–and I say this as a pilot with both FAA (U.S.) and JAA (European) licenses, I have difficulty in seeing what makes this such a problem from the security point of view.
I take it that what we’re concerned about is preventing another 9/11: ill-disposed people getting hold of commercial aircraft and using them as weapons. Light aircraft–your Cessna 172s and the like–are not a concern because they weigh less than a Toyota Tercel, and can carry even less of a payload. One could certainly stuff one of them full of explosives and fly them into a building: but less damage would result than doing the same with a mid-size Ford and parking it outside in the street.
That being so, it’s hard to imagine how imposing additional scrutiny on _ab initio_ flying schools will make anything or anyone safer. (And even if the object of the exercise is to keep foreigners away from Cessna 172s, such foreigners, assuming they have done their training overseas and have already got a private pilot’s license from a country that is a member of the International Civil Aviation Organization, can perfectly legally come in on a tourist visa, call around to the local FAA Flight Standards District Office with their documentation, and obtain a temporary airman’s certificate that will entitle them to rent and fly U.S.-registered aircraft for the duration of their stay.)
Nobody wants people with evil intent flying any sort of aircraft, large or small, of course. But neither does anyone want them renting Ryder trucks, stuffing them full of home-made explosive, and parking them in the basement of the World Trade Center (remember Ramzi Yousef, 1993?). The time and place to scrutinize them is at the border when they first present themselves for entry. Otherwise, the focus must be on ensuring that baddies do not get access to the sharp and pointy ends of commercial aircraft. Banning all foreigners from U.S. flight schools will do precisely nothing to make that more likely.
Mar 6, 2008 - 7:15 am 7. Steve in Ohio:Gustave, your point is well made, but unfortunately it only supports doing away with the regulations regarding flight schools. The point here is that these ARE the regulations, and they are not being enforced by TSA, just like they weren’t enforced by the INS before. The bloated government said that these regulations should be in place, whether you or I agree or not, then spent a LOT of taxpayer money getting more bloated, and now… things are no better than before 9/11.
Perhaps you sleep well at night because you accurately understand the true lack of risk here with regards to pilot training, but what about all those other risks, the real ones, that we depend on the inept TSA to mitigate? If they can’t save us from this made up risk, what about the truly dangerous stuff?
Mar 6, 2008 - 10:09 am 8. Tim Sumner:Consider this.
The Transportation Security Administration first denied it let thousands of aliens attend flight schools without a security check before admitting, during 2005 alone, that only “836 aliens” attended without first being checked. The TSA now says that after their training, it determined that none of them was a threat. The TSA also has said that “60 to 70 percent” of all flight school attendees never complete the training yet the TSA allows them to start training 30 days after applicants send in their fingerprints and their $130 application fee.
The “business” and “tourist” 9/11 hijacker pilots never fully completed their training, yet learned enough to murder 3,000 people.
BTW, the law’s intent was (as Congress stated) that the checks be completed prior to an alien attending, and then only for those with a student visa. Yet the language of the bill left wiggle room for the exceptions, for aliens to attend if 30 days elapsed after they paid their fee and submitted their fingerprints. The exceptions have turned into the norm, the TSA is deliberately ignoring the student visa requirement, and this is a cash cow for both the TSA (the $130 fee) and the flights schools ($10 million plus per year in extra revenue).
Mar 6, 2008 - 2:43 pm 9. Tim Sumner:BTW (#2), the TSA has an even bigger cash cow it just rolled out. See greenbaygazette.com, the March 1, 2008, edition, for this article: ID cards designed to protect nation’s ports. One million workers at $132.50 per ID card.
Mar 6, 2008 - 3:06 pm 10. Tim Sumner:Sorry. Make that greenbaypressgazette.com
Mar 6, 2008 - 3:21 pm 11. Gustave:Steve in Ohio:-
I know what you mean. Like you, I doubt that the TSA, or Homeland Security, are doing very much better in the areas that are genuinely safety-critical. But if they were to say, “Frankly, we have to prioritize, and we’ve been putting our marbles into areas in which we think there’s more of a risk than flight schools,” I for one wouldn’t beat them up for it.
Tim Sumner:-
The truth is that one could probably train a reasonably intelligent and co-ordinated individual to keep, say, a B767 right-side-up and fly it from A to B (assuming, of course, that it is already in flight) without that person ever getting any hands-on cockpit training at all, relying exclusively on computer-based instruction with software available on the open market. Microsoft Flight Simulator wouldn’t do it, but some of the more sophisticated IFR packages for professional pilots like Elite Jet 8.1 very well might.
Mar 6, 2008 - 4:52 pm 12. Steve in Ohio:3,000 people weren’t murdered because hijackers took flight training in U.S. Flight Schools; 3,000 people were murdered because hijackers had easy access to airplane cockpits and passengers in hijacked airplanes were highly trained to sit still and wait for the authorities to rescue them.
God bless all the victims of that day, and God especially bless the heroes on Flight 93 who saved hundreds of more lives.
Mar 6, 2008 - 4:56 pm 13. Tim Sumner:Gustave –
Perhaps you are right, maybe you can learn the controls, sequences, and steps you need to fly at you PC’s keyboard. I’m skeptical though for it is a lot to mentally translate from that keyboard to the actual controls. Yet the TSA’s biggest failing is one of trust, the promise it was tasked to keep to the crews and passengers. Our country was successfully attacked and my family buried what was left of one the last time; that was one attack too many and one funeral far too soon.
Steve –
Mar 6, 2008 - 7:37 pm 14. blabbinit:That training contributed just as much as the things you sited.
Wow, this is scary. You would think that there would be a safer guard against this stuff from happening. I wouldn’t fault the flight schools, but it is the government’s responsibility to have some kind of law in place to manage and verify the people who are taking the classes. We can’t let terrorists train themselves on our homeland.
Mar 6, 2008 - 8:34 pm 15. michael clarke:But what about the plot? I mean, Looose Change and Michael Mooore showed how Bush was behind everything, and wernt those Navy planes? You mean that 19 foreign terrorists actually did that? Lighten up, Dude….
Mar 7, 2008 - 1:22 am 16. Steve in Ohio:Tim, I beg to differ. Let’s return to that morning of Septmeber 11th: Hijackers trained as pilots suddenly attack other passengers and Stewardesses, then rush up to the cockpit door and… find it locked and bolted. Clawing desparately at the door, they finally… return to their seats and wait to be arrested, their pilot training not having provided them the power to break through locked, secured doors after all.
Mar 7, 2008 - 3:51 am 17. William Shanley:I want to apologize to everyone for passing along the data that 60 million Americans were living on less than $7 per day published by the New York Times, Financial Times of London and the World Socialist Web Site without doing an independent verification. I’m so sorry, and am working to correct the mess. However, Annie Jacobsen, the rude and nasty, shrill paranoid woman who harassed me and then refused to copy me her on her piece is hardly doing your readers justice with her way of being or tactics. Moreover, she excerpted and took out of context some rather playful biographical comments and used them to ridicule , not inform. Hardly the stuff of good neighbors. Isn’t this the woman who was so paranoid about Muslim clerics on a plane that she had it grounded because of her paranoia of terrorists? I suggest that if she wants to see a real terrorist, that she book a flight to to Iraq, where several well respected studies now report that between 600,000 and 1.2 million Iraqis have died since we invaded. Or, go to the concentration camp Israel has made the Gaza, break bread with the little people while US supplied helicopter gunships terrorize you to death. Many blessings to all.
Mar 10, 2008 - 7:23 pm