Gyrocopter Was Detected by
Radar Before Landing at Capitol, Pilot Deserves Stiffer Penalty, Officials Say
The man who flew what he
called a “flying bicycle” through restricted airspace above the nation’s
capital and landed near the U.S. Capitol two weeks ago was picked up by
government radars, but those radars weren't able to distinguish the small
aircraft from birds or even pockets of weather, so no alarms were sounded, U.S.
officials told lawmakers today.
In a separate hearing
before lawmakers, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson called for tougher
penalties in such cases, saying the four years behind bars that gyrocopter
pilot Doug Hughes, 61, of Ruskin, Florida, is now facing isn't enough.
Johnson said Hughes' stunt
"constitutes a threat to public safety, not just to the intruder but to
those on the ground.”
After all, as FAA
Administrator Michael Huerta acknowledged in written testimony submitted to the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, federal officials didn't even
realize that Hughes had breached restricted airspace.
"On April 15, Mr.
Hughes’ gyrocopter appeared on our radar as one of those small, unidentified
elements," Huerta said. "All available information about the slow
moving, irregular symbol made it indistinguishable from other non-aircraft
radar tracks."
In his testimony before
the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, DHS chief
Johnson said tougher penalties for such breaches would act "as a
deterrent," and "we should consider enhancing the penalties for those
types of offenses."
Hughes is charged in
federal court with one count of knowingly operating an aircraft not properly
registered and one count of violating national air defense space. In addition
to a total of four years behind bars, Hughes faces substantial fines for his
act of civil disobedience, which he hoped would bring attention to the issue of
campaign finance reform.
“To me that [penalty] is
completely inadequate based on the extent that Mr. Hughes put other lives in
jeopardy,” said the chairman of the Senate committee, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.,
agreeing with the DHS secretary's assessment.
Aircraft that fly around
Washington, D.C., airspace are required to be equipped with a transponder.
According to Huerta's
testimony, “Anything that doesn’t have a transponder shows up as a symbol
resembling a simple small dot on the radar screen -- and there are typically
many of them across a controller’s radar screen.”
Many of those dots are
filtered out of what FAA controllers see on their screens. These dots “could be
things like vehicles on nearby roadways, flocks of birds, weather events, or
occasional kites or balloons,” Huerta says.
An unfiltered radar feed
is shared with the Department of Defense and other agencies, so those
entities can apply their own filters to the data.
After the aircraft landed,
the radar data was analyzed.
According to Huerta: “A
trained radar analyst identified a slow-moving symbol that traveled from
Gettysburg [Pennsylvania] toward the Capitol, and vanished from radar at about
the time Mr. Hughes landed on the West Lawn. We now believe that unidentified radar
element was Mr. Hughes’ gyrocopter. The dot appeared only intermittently
throughout the flight.”
Testimony from
NORTHCOM/NORAD commander Adm. William Gortney corroborates the new insight into
what the government’s network of sensors saw: The aircraft was detected, but it
was not sifted out from clutter to distinguish it from other objects.
“Through post-event
analysis, what we now understand is that the gyrocopter was detected by several
of the integrated sensors as it approached and transited through the SFRA
(special flight rules area).
However, the aircraft’s
flight parameters fell below the threshold necessary to differentiate aircraft
from weather, terrain, birds and other slow-flying objects so as to ensure that
the systems and those operating them focus on that which poses the greatest
threat,” Adm. Gortney’s testimony states.
Gortney acknowledges that,
“Identifying low-altitude and slow-speed aerial vehicles from other objects is
a technical and operational challenge.”
Testimony from the U.S.
Capitol Police, U.S. Park Police, U.S. Secret Service and Sergeant at Arms
largely confirms what was already known publicly about the incident based on
ABC News reporting and statements from the Tampa Bay Times. A Tampa Bay Times
reporter called the Secret Service and the Capitol Police at around 1 p.m. on
April 15 -- approximately 20 minutes before the gyrocopter landed.
The Tampa Bay Times
reporter, according to testimony from U.S. Capitol Police Chief Kim Dine,
called the Capitol Police and advised them that video of the flight could be
seen on a live stream. At 1:07 p.m., the Capitol Police “went to the provided
website but did not find the live feed noted by the individual from the Time
Bay Times.”
The Capitol Police also
attempted to “validate any prohibited airspace overflight information” with the
National Capitol Region Coordination Center, where other government agencies
like NORAD and the FAA could share information.
The aircraft landed at
1:23 p.m.
The review by authorities
is ongoing and agencies are working to develop short and long-term approaches
to handling the threat posed by low- and slow-flying aircraft.
#JTF
Jerry - the First is a
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