NEW YORK – The chairman of the Senate subcommittee overseeing aviation said Friday he would recommend holding congressional hearings on aircraft registration after The Associated Press reported the Federal Aviation Administration was missing data on one-third of U.S. planes.
"We need to find out why, and how it can be brought back to have a registry that has credibility," said North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, a Democrat.
The FAA says as many as 119,000 of the 357,000 U.S.-registered aircraft have "questionable registration" due to missing paperwork, invalid addresses and other paperwork problems.
In reports in 2007 and 2008, the agency warned that the probblem was causing loopholes that terrorists, drug traffickers and other criminals might exploit. It was concerned that a criminal might use a U.S. registration, known as an N-number, to slip by computer systems designed to track suspicious flights.
So we are body scanning every good citizen at airports in the U.S., but have lost track of over 100,000 aircraft? Not to mention literally thousands of large potentially dangerous radio control models, some approaching more than 1/2 the size of real aircraft. These "models" have zero accountability or tracking. They could easily carry bombs or chemicals in sufficient quantities to do major damage. But what the heck, lets just harass in the people boarding planes instead of addressing pertinent issues.
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