Boston Globe Slams FAA Oversight of Private Aircraft

General aviation is the latest topic to come under the harsh beam of the awarding-winning Spotlight investigative series from the Boston Globe. Titled “Secrets in the Sky” and published in late September, the report takes the FAA to task for its alleged failure to monitor and keep current its general aviation aircraft and pilot registration records. As a consequence, the article concludes that a “web of secrecy surrounds thousands of airplanes, making it nearly impossible to identify an airplane’s real owners and hold them accountable.”

The article claims that “lax oversight by the FAA over decades has made it easy for drug dealers, corrupt politicians and even people with links to terrorism to register private airplanes and conceal their identities.” The authors describe in detail several specific examples, complete with the N-numbers of the aircraft involved: corporate jets.     

Aircraft title and trust companies also came under the Globe’s scrutiny. The article describes these companies as a way for the real owners to register their aircraft in the U.S. without being noticed. The Globe reported it found that 3,500 aircraft are registered to 2,000 companies located at a single Wilmington address that is “home to a business incorporator.”

Delaware’s ostensibly easy laws for establishing corporate presence make "hiding especially easy for corporations of all kinds,” asserted the Globe. “More than one-third of all U.S. aircraft are registered to corporations,” the report says. “Of those, 11,000 are registered to firms in Delaware.”

The article is not without flaws, such as when it lambastes the FAA for not requiring photos on airman certificates. As the FAA pointed out in the report, “Pilots are also required to carry a government-issued ID such as a driver’s license to prove their identity.”

While the Globe article reported that its investigation of the FAA’s airman certification registration data netted five names that had “possible” ties to terrorism, it did not report that those five were just .00083 percent of the 600,000 names in the database.

Representative Stephen Lynch (D-Massachusetts) has introduced a bill requiring that the “real owners of U.S.-registered aircraft be publicly disclosed.”

Ed Bolen, president and CEO of NBAA, told AIN, “The business aviation community’s top priority is the law-abiding, safe and secure use of aircraft. To that end, our industry continues building on a host of common-sense measures already in place to ensure these aircraft, the pilots and passengers they carry and the airports they use are safe and secure. Unfortunately, none of these measures were outlined in the Globe series, nor did the reporting put this important information in a larger context about the true nature of business aircraft use in America today.”

The FAA told AIN it has a “team of special agents who work with domestic and international law enforcement partners to investigate cases involving fraudulent aircraft registrations” and has “worked with individual governments to systematically de-register aircraft with fraudulent registrations and to identify operators who are using aircraft for criminal purposes.” The agency conceded it does not have the resources to determine the accuracy of certified information (such as U.S. citizenship) submitted for aircraft registration.

“However, the Registry does require proof of ownership that has to match the name of the owner seeking to register the aircraft, and the form contains language that indicates making false statements is a crime. The FAA is constantly working to strengthen the integrity of Registry information and has addressed the DOT Office of Inspector General’s cybersecurity recommendations. The agency is developing a plan to significantly upgrade and modernize the aircraft registration process.”