Clipping Pilots’ Wings

I got my pilot’s license when I was 19. I thought of it then the way new lawyers, doctors and accountants must think of their freshly minted diplomas: as visible proof of successful completion of a rite of passage, and tangible verification of my personal merits.

Pilots’ licenses have levels, like Boy Scout merit badges. There is a ladder of attainment. You start off with a private license; then there’s the commercial; and after that, if you want or need to go there, an even loftier professional level called the air transport pilot. There are also ratings for various categories of operations (like the Now-I-Am-A-Man Instrument Rating for flying blind in bad weather), or for equipment (helicopter, multi-engine, seaplane, balloon), or even for specific aircraft types (Learjet, Boeing 747). If you really love aviation, over a lifetime of flying your license is liable to grow to two or three pages.

But each page of the license is just a flimsy little paper scrap that slips into a plastic protector in your wallet.

And that’s where it pretty much disappears. You don’t have to routinely display it before takeoff or after landing. There are no security checkpoints on the way to the hangar. You’d take it out to rent an airplane, of course. And theoretically, you could be approached by a Federal Aviation Administration official for a “ramp check,” a random verification that all your papers -- and those of your airplane -- are in order. But I’ve never been ramp-checked, and I don’t know anybody who has.

The point is that a pilot’s license is not some hard-to-forge plastic identity card that you flash all the time like a driver’s license. It doesn’t have your picture on it. It’s not a gate card to get you onto the flight line at the airport or an electronically coded key without which your plane’s engine won’t start. It’s just a little dog-eared piece of paper that hardly anyone ever sees.

Unprepossessing though the license may be, however, the news that under a new administration edict it could be revoked without a hearing if the Transportation Security Administration deemed the holder a “security risk” gave me, and I’m sure many other pilots, the creeps. The pilot’s license may be just an unvisited scrap, but it’s an intensely important one for people whose lives, either professional or emotional, are wrapped up in flying.

Not that I see myself as being particularly at risk. I am not a Muslim; my skin is light; as far as I know I have no enemies who would want to denounce me to the authorities. But rules like this are made to be abused.

What if I were of a suspect origin, religion or color, or had a disgruntled employee, or flew for a living? Would I now have to think twice about what I said, or where I traveled, or whom I talked to or offended, lest I somehow come to the attention of the watchdogs at the TSA? Are there opinions that I would no longer feel free to express? And if I were for some unimaginable reason identified as a “risk” -- if, let’s say, I wrote an article suggesting that the war on terrorism was taking us in some bad directions -- how in the world would I prove that I was not? It was the same in the time of the blacklist; once branded “disloyal” -- even assuming that disloyalty had any clear meaning, or ought to be forbidden -- how was a person to prove otherwise?

We thought all that had been turned around: The blacklisted writers had become the heroes, and the sniffers-out of “un-American activities” (what could be less American than that very phrase?) the villains. Are we forgetting so quickly what we took so long to learn?

This new policy is frighteningly highhanded, arbitrary and indifferent to due process. It places suspicion on the same footing as proof and calls for a sort of preemptive punishment that I thought was unconstitutional.

But what makes it particularly contemptible is that it’s also stupid. No one who actually wants to use an airplane to attack a building or public assembly will be deterred by lack of a pilot’s license, any more than the driver of the getaway car for a gang of bank robbers would call off a heist because his driver’s license had expired. A pilot intent on terrorism doesn’t need a paper allowing him to fly.

The whole notion that pulling pilots’ licenses can enhance the nation’s security is simply silly. It might intimidate and infuriate some citizens; it might reassure some others who naively imagine that a pilot’s license is necessary for the operation of an airplane. But no nefarious aerial plot will be foiled by the new policy.

Despite the magnitude of the attack of Sept. 11, airplanes by and large are not particularly suitable tools for mayhem; mostly they’re too small and light and of limited carrying capacity. On the other hand, if the scheme is to sow toxins from the air, that could be done quite nicely from small, ultralight aircraft whose pilots aren’t even required to have licenses.

All right, granted, this time it’s my ox that’s gored. Pilots are a small minority in the general population, and for the most part a privileged one. This wound to their civil liberties is not likely to kindle widespread indignation, just as the random deportations and indefinite detentions of strangers of obscure nationality and uncertain intentions have aroused only a barely audible outcry. But one by one the precedents are being set, and the poison is spreading. How far is our country willing to go in trading real freedoms for illusions of security?