Opinion: Security violation
Your humble scribe learns that TSA has no sense of humor
I had been feeling guilty about all the time my poor airplane had been sitting unloved in the hangar during the last months of 2024, and decided that Christmas week would be a great time to do some serious flying.
I’d been invited by friends in South Florida to spend Christmas with them. It sounded like fun, but the thought of flying on the airlines during a holiday was not of interest to me. On the other hand, flying from California to Florida in my Cessna 310 sounded like fun if the weather was cooperative. So, I remained noncommittal while keeping an eye on the long-range prog charts.
By Wednesday, December 18, I was satisfied that the flying weather in the southern half of the United States would be benign over the pre-Christmas weekend, and I told my friends that I was coming. They sounded delighted until I let them know that I’d be flying there in my own airplane. It seems there had been a bunch of GA accidents on the TV news, and they were not comfortable with the thought of me flying solo coast-to-coast at age 80. They tried their best to persuade me to take the airline instead. Obviously, they were unsuccessful.
Getting ready
On Thursday, December 19, I drove to my hangar to get the airplane ready the trip. I topped the tanks, cleaned the windshield, checked the oil, and updated the navigation databases in my Garmin GNS 530, 430, GI 275s, and yoke-mounted GPSMAP 696. Upon returning home, I started my flight planning in earnest.
I figured the round-trip would involve about 25 hours of flying, roughly 11 hours going eastbound and 14 hours going westbound. At about 14 gph per engine (28 gph total), that would require about 700 gallons of 100LL. Multiply that by six bucks a gallon and…let’s just say that fuel price was going to play a major role in planning the route.
After ping-ponging between ForeFlight (routing) and Airnav (fuel prices), I decided to make an initial fuel stop at Las Cruces, New Mexico (LRU), and then to stay overnight in Lufkin, Texas (LFK), at the extreme east edge of Texas just shy of the Louisiana border. Those two legs would take about three hours and 45 minutes each and would get me about two-thirds of the way to my final destination—Pompano Beach, Florida (PMP)—on Saturday. I’d finish up the last one-third on Sunday; I could do that nonstop, but decided to land for cheap fuel at Mariana, Florida (MAI).
Off we go…
To make it to Lufkin before nightfall, taking the two-hour time zone change into account, I needed to get an early start. The tower at Santa Maria Public Airport (SMX) opens at 6 a.m. local, and my plan was to be their very first customer. I arrived at the airport at 5:15 and used my access badge to open the security gate. It was pitch dark and there was not another person, vehicle, or aircraft in sight. As usual, I paused after driving through the gate to ensure no one was tailgating through behind me. Seeing nothing, I drove to my hangar.
I loaded my bags into the airplane, towed it out of the hangar, climbed into the cockpit, started engines, and taxied to the runup area. During my preflight runup, Santa Maria Tower announced it was open. I reported holding short of Runway 30 and asked for my IFR clearance to LRU. I copied and read back my clearance and was cleared for takeoff right on schedule. It was still pitch dark.
The flight to Las Cruces and then Lufkin went smooth as silk, with CAVU weather, no turbulence, and nice tailwinds. At almost exactly 4 p.m. CST, I touched down on Runway 7 at Lufkin, taxied to the nice FBO operated by Angelina County, and requested that all tanks be topped off with their bargain-priced $4.99 per gallon 100LL. The airport is located about seven miles from downtown Lufkin. When I asked the best way to get to my hotel, they handed me the keys to one of the FBO’s two courtesy cars. I loaded my luggage into the courtesy car, then used my iPhone to help me navigate from the airport to the hotel. The phone indicated I’d missed a phone call while airborne, and the caller had left a lengthy voicemail which I dutifully played back.
Busted!
The caller identified himself as Rollo, operations officer at Santa Maria. “You were observed committing a gate violation,” he said, and went on to explain that when I used my badge to open and enter the access gate at 5:15 a.m., the gate failed to close behind me, and I failed to detect and report the failure. A review of the security camera video by Rollo revealed that the gate remained open for a half-hour before the gate operator failure was detected and corrected by airport maintenance staff.
Of course, it was my responsibility to detect and report the stuck gate, and my failure to do so put me in violation of 49 CFR 1540.105 (“Security responsibilities of employees and other persons”). Fortunately for me, no one was observed entering or leaving the airport property through the stuck-open gate, otherwise I’d have been in a lot more trouble than I already was.
The voicemail explained that because of my violation, my airport access badge had been deactivated. Since the badge is required to activate the gate on both ingress and egress, I would not be able to leave the airport when I returned from my trip. I would need to arrange to be escorted off the airport by an airport employee. I would then not be permitted to re-enter the airport to access my hangar until I had completed remedial security training at the airport office and paid a reinstatement fee. This was not exactly the Christmas gift I had been hoping for.
On Sunday, I flew to Pompano with a fuel stop at Mariana. My friends met me at the airport, and I spent a delightful Christmas week with them in South Florida, including a big party on Christmas Day and another on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas).
Return to the crime scene
On Saturday morning, December 28, I departed Pompano headed to Jackson, Tennessee (MKL), to visit my friend Paul New, A&P/IA, owner of Tennessee Aircraft Services, and my podcast co-conspirator on Ask the A&Ps. Originally, I was going to just stop there for lunch and fuel before continuing westbound so I could arrive back home at Santa Maria on Sunday. However, given my gate violation predicament, I figured it was better to delay my return until Monday when it would be easier to arrange for an airport employee escort off the premises. So, I decided to stay overnight with Paul and his wife, Helen, and then head west Sunday morning. That turned out to be a fortuitous plan, because a few hours after my arrival at Jackson, a storm came through and dumped lots of rain and lightning bolts throughout the evening and into the early morning. By the time I departed Jackson, the storm had passed, leaving only 25 knots, gusting to 35 surface winds that were easily manageable.
I’d filed for a fuel stop in Dumas (DUX) . My cruising altitude was lower than usual—6,000 feet—but nonetheless the headwinds were brutal. Approaching Tulsa, I realized I would be passing just north of Ada where my good friend George Braly (of GAMI, lean-of-peak operations, and G100UL fame) is based. I texted Braly and asked him if he had lunch plans. He didn’t, so I diverted and met him for lunch. I’ve always thought that one of the great joys of traveling via GA is the ability to visit friends along the way. (Shortly after I landed, I got a text from Paul New: “I see you diverted. Is everything OK?” He’d been watching me on FlightAware.)
After a leisurely lunch with Braly, I flew to Dumas, arriving there in mid-afternoon. This was going to be a quick-turn fuel stop, but since my spontaneous lunch had put me behind schedule, I decided to remain overnight in Dumas. Once again, I asked how to get into town, and the FBO handed me keys to the courtesy car. You have to love these small-town GA airports.
I departed Dumas at 8:30 Monday morning, refueled at historic Lindburgh Field in Winslow, Arizona (INW), and with the time zone changes working in my favor, arrived home at Santa Maria about 2 p.m. I put the airplane in the hangar, transferred my luggage and Christmas gifts from the airplane to the car, and called the airport office to arrange for an escort through the security gate. My escort turned out to be the airport maintenance foreman, and I had a long talk with him about how and why the gate failed to close when I entered nine days earlier at zero-dark-thirty. Turns out there’s an optical beam to prevent the gate from closing when a vehicle is crossing the transom, and condensation on the lens or a spider web can fool it. Who knew?
Remedial training
The next morning at 9 a.m., I presented myself at the Santa Maria Public Airport District Office for my remedial security training. Rollo was on vacation, so his boss Ric wound up being my instructor. He spent just over an hour with me, and it was an educational and enjoyable hour indeed.
Ric made it clear that he hated all this security stuff as much as I did, but that he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Although Santa Maria is overwhelmingly a GA airport, it has limited airline service: exactly two flights a week to and from Las Vegas. Because of this very limited airline service, Santa Maria is subject to the Draconian influence of the dreaded TSA—the same government entity that convinced me not to fly to Florida on the airlines.
Ric explained that despite its de minimis airline presence, the TSA regularly sends tiger teams to audit Santa Maria security, and it’s never enough to satisfy them. In addition to gates, badges, and cameras, the feds would really like uniformed guards posted at each access gate 24/7. The airport has resisted this, arguing that highly responsible badge-carrying airport tenants provide adequate policing of the access gates. Which explains why when a tenant like me screws up, they must take it seriously.
After going over the rules, Ric related a couple of eye-opening stories to help me understand just how little sense of humor TSA has about security violations at Santa Maria. A transient pilot who landed at SMX used a folding bicycle to ride from the airport to a nearby restaurant for a bite to eat. Upon returning, he tailgated through one of the security gates behind a vehicle driven by an airport employee, loaded the bike into his airplane, and departed. The airport was required to report the incident to TSA, who slapped the pilot with a $14,000 fine.
In another case, a pilot climbed over the fence and opened a pedestrian gate from the inside to allow his passengers, a woman and kids, to enter. When this was reported to TSA, they started taking steps to scramble fighters to intercept the pilot but relented when they learned a woman and children were onboard. Instead, a contingent of uniformed TSA personnel met the aircraft at its destination, detained the pilot for hours, and fined him $25,000. Like I said, these guys have absolutely no sense of humor.
Ric concluded our hour together with a five-question quiz. I answered them correctly and was then was asked to pay a reinstatement fee of $100, which I considered eminently fair given the hour Ric had spent with me and the additional hour Rollo had spent reviewing security camera footage and notifying me of my violation. Ric reinstated my access badge with a few mouse clicks and told me I was good to go.
I got off easy because I was a first-time offender and because, fortunately, my gate violation did not result in any unauthorized entry to the airport. A second violation would result in me being locked out of the airport for at least a week, and a third would result in permanent revocation of my access privileges (and presumably my hangar lease). Not to worry—it’s not going to happen again. 
