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Flight Training Schools Lack Security Rules
Congressional panel, GAO report fault Homeland Security for ‘weaknesses’ in
flight school rules
By Bobby Caina Calvan, Globe Staff
WASHINGTON -- Homeland Security officials need to do a better job in performing
background checks on students enrolling in flight schools across the country,
according to a government report released Wednesday that indicates continuing
failures by federal authorities in preventing those in the country illegally
from acquiring training that some worry could lead to another terrorist attack.
The report by the Government Accountability Office also sheds more light on the
2010 federal investigation that led to the arrest of the owner of a Stow flight
school whose facility had trained dozens of foreign nationals -- including at
least eight who, like the school’s owner, was in the United States illegally.
The report was unveiled before a session of a transportation security subpanel
of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Committee members from both sides
of the aisle expressed alarm over the slow pace of enacting tougher rules at
flight schools and the lack of coordination among federal agencies in preventing
possible terrorists from acquiring flight training.
Indeed, the panel members expressed concern that the government wasn’t doing
enough to prevent potential terrorists from obtaining flight training,
regardless if they are foreign nationals or US citizens.
“Today’s hearing is a sobering reminder that we cannot afford to let down our
guard or become complacent about security,” said the committee’s chairman,
Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama.
Raise Your Voice
Click to contact candidates or elected officials about this issue. “The GAO’s
finding is clear,” he said. “Not all foreign nationals who train to fly inside
the United States have been properly vetted.” He called the GAO’s findings
“extremely disturbing.”
The title of the hearing was certainly provocative: “A Decade After 9/11 Could
American Flight Schools Still Unknowingly Be Training Terrorists?”
The terrorists who commandeered the four US commercial jetliners on Sept. 11,
2001, including two that took off from Logan airport and later slammed into the
World Trade Center towers, learned to fly at schools in Florida, Minnesota, and
Arizona.
Based on its investigation, including a review of the Boston-area flight school,
the GAO urged the Transportation Security Administration and the US Immigration
and Customs Enforcement to assign responsibility for drafting a road map, with
steps and time frames, to improve coordination between the two agencies, both
housed under the Department of Homeland Security.
The Massachusetts case exposed the shortcomings of the Alien Flight Student
Program in screening out those in the country illegally from taking part in the
program, said Stephen Lord, the GAO expert on homeland security and justice
issues, during his presentation to the committee.
Homeland Security officials acknowledged that no such checks are made when
students enroll in the program, but are usuallly conducted during the issuance
of licenses. By that time, the potential harm has been done, according to
Representative Bennie G. Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi.
From January 2006 to September 2011, the GAO said there were 25,599 foreign
nationals who applied for pilots’ licenses from the Federal Aviation
Administration after completing flight training at US schools. Representatives
from both agencies told the committee that progress was already being made to
improve their ability to detect the immigration status of those applying for
pilots’ licenses. But a review by the GAO showed that not all of those foreign
nationals were registered, as required, in the Alien Flight Student Program,
which is supposed to vet students for security threats.
Thompson said the government needs to widen its net to include not only
foreigners but US citizens with nefarious intent.
“The last individual to fly a plane into a building and kill innocent civilians
in this country was not a foreign national or Islamist extremist,” Thompson
said. “It was a United States citizen with an extremist and violent ideology
regarding the Internal Revenue Service.”
Thompson was referring to the 2010 incident in Texas in which a disgruntled
53-year-old man flew his small plane into a seven-story building housing an IRS
office.
Other members were particularly troubled by the admission from Homeland Security
officials that despite rules put in place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks
people on the government’s “no-fly” list aren’t being screened out from
enrolling in a flight schools.
“We have cancer patients, Iraq war veterans, Nobel Peace Prize winners all
forced to undergo rigorous security checks before getting on an airplane,” said
Rogers. “At the same time, there are foreign nationals in the US training to
fly, just like Mohamed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers did, and not all of
them are necessarily getting a security background check.”
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