Washington — Some Kansas flight schools have tightened security procedures after a 15-year-old flight student flew his plane into a Florida bank building during the weekend.
Some have stopped giving plane keys to students for preflight checks, and others are doing more background checks.
David Dewhirst, owner of the Sabris Corp. flight school at Jabara Field, said every flight school in the country uses the same procedures as the Florida flight school. "That is the way it has been done since the Wright brothers," he said.
But Dewhirst said Sabris is considering doing the same background checks on its students as those used for people who buy hand guns. The school has also begun having instructors keep the keys until they get out to the field for flight training.
"That is our token contribution to reacting to people who don't know very much about the task, but feel the necessity to criticize it," he said.
At Mid-Continent Airport, Yingling Aviation has also stopped giving the keys to its new students to do preflight checks on airplanes until an instructor is present, said Terry Cox, director of flight training.
Yingling has been doing more lengthy entrance interviews since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. More than 90 percent of the students who learn to fly at Yingling are local residents.
At Sabris, where 20 percent are foreign, the school had its own unique procedures in place long before the terrorist attacks.
"A couple of years ago, we had our own lack of comfort with people from the Middle East, particularly Iraq, Iran and Kuwait. ... Our instructors did not appreciate flying with them, and it became an arduous task to find an instructor to fly with them," Dewhirst said.
Flight instructors had problems with what Dewhirst called the Middle Easterners' "attitude toward accepting personal responsibility." So the school, while not turning them away, told them the only flight instructors available were women, he said.
"We have not had a Middle Eastern student in two years," he said.
Meanwhile, security at Jabara Airport, among the busiest for general aviation flights in the area, is about as strong as any other light aviation airport in the country, Dewhirst said. It has a chain-link fence around the airport and is manned 24 hours a day.
It is far more difficult to steal an aircraft from one of the Wichita plane manufacturers, all of which stepped up security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
At Cessna, finished aircraft are kept in hangars most of the time and when they are outside the planes are locked, said Jessica Myers, spokeswoman for Cessna. Access is also closely controlled to aircraft at the Cessna employee flying club.
At Bombardier, construction is not completed in Wichita but at the company's Tucson, Ariz., facility so there are not a lot of finished aircraft sitting on a ramp in Wichita, said Bombardier spokesman Dave Franson.
Raytheon Aircraft said procedures tightened after the terrorist attacks are sufficient to prevent incidents such as what happened in Tampa during the weekend.
Flight school operators also note that no background check would have screened out a 15-year-old flight student with no history of problems.
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