Merry Christmas--Now Duck And Cover !

It appears that our federal Keystone Kops have done it again. At a time when a nuclear device can be put into a container about the size of your average chest of drawers and lethal aerobic toxins can be released like the chemicals over a cornfield, the Federal Aviation Administration has informed us that 119,000 airplanes in America are faultily registered.

These gaps include missing forms, invalid addresses, unreported sales, and (shall I say it?) just plain missing planes. That's approximately one-third of all the private and commercial planes in the United States. Details, details. We are coming up on the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center. There was a failure of security and common sense that could be partially forgiven by virtue of the fact that nothing like that had ever come close to being successfully attempted. We've been told that Al Qaeda and its fellow terrorist organizations are adaptive. But with that many AWOL planes at their disposal, they won't have to adapt much. Did that never occur to our brilliant federal authorities?

The FAA has failed badly in its duty to know where every airworthy aircraft in America is at any given time, who owns it, and what use it is being put to. Given that it's a human institution, the goal of absolute knowledge is unrealistic. But one-third of the fleet? Rank amateurs could do better than that. The confusion would be funny if it weren't so dangerous. Drug-trafficers have gotten away with importing huge quantities of cocaine and marijuana into the country with phony registration, while on the other side of the coin, raids and arrests have been made on perfectly innocent people because of misconstrued registration. And you thought your local Department of Motor Vehicles was bad.

There are multiple reasons to get the records up-to-date. Airports use the registration for landing fees. Regulators use it for informing plane-owners of safety defects and technology updates. And yes, states use it for charging sales tax. Those are important matters, but they pale in comparison to the security threat all those missing and/or improperly-registered planes comprise.

The FAA long ago started computerizing the records, but so far all it has accomplished is confirming the number of aircraft that it can't account for. And, sorry to say, that number is growing, not shrinking. All airplanes registered in the United States have a "tail number" which always begins with the letter "N." From what we can see thus far, the N stands for "nullity." First of all, the number is easily altered for the convenience of the new owner, the terrorist, the drug-dealer, or anybody else who wants to fly that day. Many of the unaccounted-for planes are long gone to that aircraft graveyard in the sky, or are rusting in somebody's field, or are waiting for the estate of the deceased owner to sell and re-register the craft. But if only 10% of those aircraft are in the wrong hands, that's 11,900 disasters waiting to happen.

Potential terrorists could easily slip through the registration hole, while information about suspicious aircraft could lead to the seizure of the plane and arrest of the owner even though he thought he owned a legally registered plane and was using it solely for perfectly legal flying. So the FAA has gone into panic draconian mode.

Within the next three years, all plane registrations will be canceled and those who own or possess the craft will have to go through a new registration process. It's a start, though it will wreak havoc with banks, owners, federal offices. Ten years after 9-11, the FAA is doing the job it should have been doing all along. And if it had, these measures would not have been necessary, and we would have a much more realistic assessment of just how many potentially-dangerous aircraft there are out there--if any.