June Scare Over Plane Tied to Error and Equipment Failure
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: July 8, 2004
WASHINGTON, July 8 — Security officials last month mistook a police plane carrying the governor of Kentucky for a terrorist threat, and ordered an evacuation of the United States Capitol, because of a combination of commonplace equipment failure on the plane, incompatible computers on the ground, and a series of human errors that various participants missed chances to notice, experts testified today at a House hearing.
The plane carrying Gov. Ernie Fletcher to former President Ronald Reagan's funeral landed safely at Reagan National Airport, but the Capitol police, concluding from information on a government hotline that an unidentified aircraft bearing down on them, hustled hundreds of people out of the Capitol and surrounding office buildings.
The result was "people running through the streets, having security people yelling at them, `take off your shoes, run run run, the plane will hit in two minutes," said Ellen O. Tauscher, Democrat of California, a member of the House Aviation subcommittee, speaking at the hearing today. She and other members complained that the integration of information from the Federal Aviation Administration, which manages the nation's civilian air traffic system, and the Department of Defense, begun after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, would have to be improved.
"We have got to get this right," she said.
But the committee chairman, John Mica of Florida, and several other members concentrated on a different point — that National Airport remains closed to most traffic besides scheduled airliners, at the insistence of security officials, even though the sequence of events involving the Kentucky State Police plane indicate that the ban on most private planes may not preclude an attack on Washington using such a plane.
The plane, a twin-engine turboprop of a type that usually has space for 8 people, was approaching Reagan National Airport with a broken transponder, a piece of electronic equipment that listens for queries from the civilian radar system on the ground and responds with the plane's identity and altitude. From the timing of the response, the radar system can deduce the plane's longitude and latitude.
According to Linda Schuessler, an F.A.A. official who testified at the hearing, the pilot was in radio contact with the air traffic controllers, which shares radar data with the Transportation Security Administration. But she said the fact that the plane was a legitimate flight with a broken transponder was not communicated, either by the computers of the two agencies, or the humans involved in tracking flights.
When the transponder failed, soon after takeoff from an airport near Cincinnati, an air traffic controller manually entered data into the F.A.A. radar display, indicating its identity and indicating that its transponder was broken, according to F.A.A. officials. But communications with military and security officials broke down at several points along the way, they said.
In a post-Sept. 11 innovation, data from F.A.A. radars is fed to a security center in suburban Virginia called the National Capitol Region Coordination Center, where it is observed by people from the Transportation Security Administration. But the information that was manually typed in by the controller was not available at the coordination center.
Someone at the coordination center called the F.A.A. to say that there was an "unidentified target," meaning a blip on a radar screen that indicated a flying object, with no identification attached, said Greg Martin, a spokesman for the agency. The F.A.A. person assigned to talk to the center looked at the screen and saw "that everyone is present and accounted for," said Mr. Martin, a spokesman for the agency, because each radar blip had a data tag attached. The F.A.A. person did not notice a line in the data tag indicating a broken transponder, Mr. Martin said.
"When you do have a human error, the system defaulted to the highest level of security," Mr. Martin said.
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