Martha's Vineyard covered by a TFR next week. Pilots may fly there with 72 hours notice to the TSA and FAA. The feds have set up another website to type into.
I complied, and typed my name and demographic information three times. When I got to the first crewmember entry, state or province of birth was a required field. Sorry, no Quebec province entry allowed. The website has no helpdesk, so if you cannot select the abbreviation from a drop down box, you cannot move to the next stage. Therefore, you will not get permission, not if you are Canadian.
I opened my secret file to make a note of my new userid and password. Here is the list of logins I found:
FAA Safety Team
FAA chart ordering
FAA IACRA
TSA flight school candidates
TSA eAPIS
TSA Customs Sticker registration
FCC Radio Licence registration
Congatulations to all the sub-departments in the government who have each created a database. Each has created jobs-for-life. The unfortunate fact is that there appears to be no cross checking between the databases.
It's no wonder the FBI and the FAA cannot work together to identify the seven candidates for certificate revocation based on national security grounds. They don't know which database to search. If you don't get the reference, google "Joseph Mahmoud Dibee" a pilot convicted of domestic terrorism.
SAFE advocates accountability for ourselves; we should demand it of our government.
The TSA called this morning to tell me that they had rejected our application to fly to Martha's Vineyard. They told me that Martha's Vineyard was not a domestic destination. That was news to me.
After some questioning, it turned out that the problem was "the wrong form." Apparently there was enough information on my form to correctly identify our request to fly to Martha's Vineyard, but not enough to approve it. I guess it was easier to reject the request rather than allow it to be fixed.
So it was back to typing all the information again. As a result of the rejection, we had to change the trip from Monday to Tuesday.
TSA is doing a bang-up job. If they can reject all the applications, then Martha's Vineyard will remain perfectly safe. Of course all the local merchants will go broke, but if you wanna make an omelet, you gotta break a few eggs.
I guess a certain VC-25 wasn't viewed as a threat to our freedom and domestic tranquility when it wanted to visit Martha's Vineyard.
There is so much inefficiency in government I'm amazed it doesn't collapse upon itself. At this point, I'm glad to have a set of great folks at our FSDO and to see IACRA working so much better than it used to.
