Gyrocopter visits Congress: Our view

The Boeing 767 that tore through the World Trade Center on 9/11 can weigh roughly 300,000 pounds and fly at about 550 mph. That's big and fast enough to rip a catastrophic hole in virtually any building.

An approximately 250-pound gyrocopter flying at about 50 mph, carrying a single pilot and maybe five gallons of gasoline – not so much. Most likely, it would bounce off a structure as robust as the U.S. Capitol or the White House.

So why are Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and many of her colleagues all worked up about the Florida mailman who flew low through some of the most restricted airspace in the world Wednesday and landed his tiny one-man copter on the lawn of Congress? "The exposure is stunning," Pelosi said about the gyrocopter's ability to get close to her workplace. "We certainly need answers."

Actually, we need to take a deep breath.

Yes, airliners can destroy buildings and kill thousands of people. But small general aviation airplanes can smash into buildings and usually kill no one but the pilot. A gyrocopter is even less of a threat, and the drone that a man accidentally flew over a fence at the White House one night in January was still less of a menace. But because these are aircraft, they consistently provoke fear way out of proportion to the actual threat.

True, it's a little concerning that any aircraft could so easily penetrate the Special Flight Rules Area (SFRA) that covers Washington, D.C., and much of the surrounding suburbs. Pilots need radio permission from air traffic controllers to enter the roughly 70-mile-wide circle around Washington, but this pilot managed to fly through the heart of Washington without permission, without being challenged and apparently without even being noticed by authorities until he got to the Capitol.

You'd think he might have been shot down – a fear he himself reasonably had. Small-plane pilots who neglect to talk to air traffic controllers and inadvertently stray across the eastern edge of the SFRA over the Chesapeake Bay can get unnerving midair visits from Blackhawk helicopters or fighter jets. The mailman either flew below radar (judging from a video, he was only about 40 or 50 feet high on his final approach to the Capitol), or the radar that watches over Washington isn't optimized to track a target as tiny as a gyrocopter. Or both.

But stop and think for a moment about the relative danger. When small, single-engine airplanes that are much bigger and heavier than this gyrocopter hit buildings, they typically kill people in the plane. The planes' fuel tanks can rupture and start a fire. But just as typically, no one else dies, and damage to the building can be extensive but not catastrophic.

That's what happened when New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle accidentally flew his plane into a New York City apartment building in 2006, igniting a large fire and injuring several people, but killing no one but Lidle and his flight instructor. And when a disturbed young student pilot deliberately flew a single-engine plane into the Bank of America Tower in Tampa in 2002, he killed himself and damaged one room in an office.

A man with a grudge against the IRSkilled himself and an IRS office worker and started a large fire when he deliberately flew his single-engine plane into an IRS building in Austin in 2010, but the death of the man in the building was unusual. In 1994, a man stole a single-engine plane and flew it over downtown Washington and crashed it onto the White House lawn. Only the pilot died.

Even with intensive radar coverage and jets standing by at Andrews Air Force Base just outside the Beltway, the tight security around Washington is never going to be able to stop every small aircraft, gyrocopter or drone. Nor could authorities deter every car bomb or truck bomb or other imaginable attacks that determined terrorists might conceivably launch – at least not without turning the nation's capital into a walled fortress where few but government officials could live or work.

If authorities spooked by drones and gyrocopters really want something to worry about, think about this: Sunday, April 19, marks the 20th anniversary of the day Timothy McVeigh drove an innocuous-looking Ryder truck containing a fertilizer bomb up to a federal building in Oklahoma City and set off a blast that gutted the nine-story, reinforced concrete structure, killing at least 168 people.

Better to get a grip, focus on the worst threats and develop a sense of proportion about what's really dangerous and what's not. And don't freak out when someone manages to pilot what amounts to a flying lawn chair onto the Capitol grass.

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