Protecting the nation’s capital from terrorist attacks such as the Sept. 11 crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the west side of the Pentagon is practically impossible, defense leaders and counterterrorism experts say.
The city already sits in the middle of a large patch of “restricted” airspace supervised by the Federal Aviation Administration. The airspace extends from Washington Dulles International Airport, Va., in the west to Baltimore-Washington International Airport, Md., in the east, said Mac McClellan, a private pilot and editor of Flying magazine.
Any plane entering the restricted airspace is supposed to be in contact with air traffic controllers and flying with identification transponder beacons.
The restriction becomes a ban for flights over the White House, National Mall, Capitol and vice president’s residence. The lowest a plane legally can fly over these areas is 18,000 feet.
But across the Potomac River, airplanes frequently pass over the Pentagon as they take off and land at Ronald Reagan National Airport, 1½ miles to the southeast.
However, there have been no public calls to increase flight restrictions around the military headquarters.
Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., who represents the communities adjacent to the Pentagon, has voiced no opposition to reopening Reagan National, his spokesman said.
But The Washington Post, quoting anonymous senior government officials Sept. 13, reported that a decision has been made to keep Reagan National closed “indefinitely” because of security concerns.
Reagan National handles about 600 commercial flights and 100 private flights a day. The flight path to Runway 15, used by commuter airliners and other small planes, takes aircraft over the eastern side of the Pentagon. The flight paths used by large commercial jets lead the planes north and south, along the Potomac River.
Counterterrorism experts point out that the fatal American Airlines flight didn’t leave from Reagan National. It took off from Dulles, 25 miles west of the Pentagon, then flew as far as Ohio before turning back to Virginia.
An expanded ban on flights over or near the Pentagon and Washington’s federal center — enforced by paper laws — likely wouldn’t have prevented the terrorists from flying into the airspace, said David Brannan, an anti-terrorism consultant for the defense think tank Rand, which has done research for the Air Force.
Permanent air patrols?
Protecting closed airspace 24 hours a day during peacetime with combat patrols by fighter aircraft would be difficult.
Retired Air Force Gen. Chuck Horner, who headed the nation’s domestic air defense as commander of the North American Aerospace Command from 1992 to 1994, said such air patrols would require E-3 AWACS radar aircraft, Ground Tactical Air Control Radar units and a large commitment of air-to-air fighters. And fighters already have a high operations tempo, he said.
Defending the federal centers with anti-aircraft missiles also would be complex. A Patriot PAC-3 anti-aircraft missile has a range of 10 miles, while other anti-aircraft missiles have maximum range of up to 20 miles, close enough to threaten a plane circling Dulles.
The split-second command and control issue of when to open fire with fighters or missiles would be a challenge. “Do you want to give a 23-year-old a two-second life-or-death decision?” Brannan asked.
To make the issue even more complicated, any airplane shot down over greater Washington would fall into one of the nation’s most densely populated suburban areas.
Airspace often breached
Over the years, there have been several breaches of the airspace over the White House. From 1996 to mid-1998, there were more than 60 incursions, The Washington Post reported in 1998, citing nonpublic FAA records. Only a few were intentional:
• On Sept. 12, 1994, a Maryland man stole a single-engine Cessna and crashed it into the White House lawn. The pilot died after the impact.
• In 1974, an Army private stole a helicopter and landed on the White House’s South Lawn.
• More typical are incidents such as one that occurred in July 1998, when an American Airlines jet flew at 10,000 feet over the president’s residence after an air traffic controller forgot to tell the plane to turn.
In recent years, terrorism-prevention efforts also have focused on car and truck bombs, which is why you could fly a plane closer to the Pentagon than you could park near it.
Brannan said U.S. and Western European governments proved so successful at defending their buildings from truck bombs that when anti-American terrorists struck in August 1998, they chose less-protected buildings in Africa.
The idea that a commercial airliner could be hijacked and turned into a bomb hadn’t been high on the list of terrorism threats, said David Kay, who heads the Center for Counter- terrorism at Science Applications International Corp., a defense contracting and consulting firm.
A decade ago, the British government worried that the Irish Republican Army might try to shoot down an airliner over central London, but such an attack never came, Kay said.
In December 1994, Algerian terrorists hijacked an Air France Airbus A300 with the intent of crashing it into Paris. But that attack was thwarted when the plane landed to refuel in Marseilles and commandos overpowered the terrorists.
