After weathering a media storm for three weeks over his X-marks-the-spot destruction of Meigs Field, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has found a few words of support. Editorial writers at the Boston Globe gave Daley their Op/Ed attaboy on Friday, suggesting his actions, in a more restrained fashion, make a good public policy blueprint. "The Department of Homeland security and the [Transportation Security Administration] should take a page from Mayor Daley and, without using bulldozers, explore ways to reduce the threat to this country's population centers and national monuments posed by small private aircraft," the Globe opined. Well, you can imagine what EAA thought of that. President Tom Poberezny shot back a letter to the editor explaining that Daley ripped up Meigs because he has always wanted to turn it into a park and that a carefully crafted series of political maneuvers allowed him, initially, to use security concerns as slim justification for the airport's destruction. Poberezny also notes that the useful load of most GA aircraft makes them anemic, at best, as terror weapons and that if the Globe was serious about eliminating such a threat, cars, boats, trains and people would have to be banned from the city's core. Just for balance, the Globe opinionators might have looked up the views of their colleagues in Washington, D.C., where the circumstances they advocate have been in place, to varying degrees, since 9/11. In a March 30 piece, Washington Post columnist Melanie Scarborough noted that little has been achieved by banning GA traffic from within 15 nautical miles of the Washington Monument ... nothing except erosion of personal freedom.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/complete/newswire-complete-issue-38