Others say

What happened?

Doug Hughes, the letter carrier who piloted a featherweight gyrocopter over the treetops to alight on the Capitol lawn Wednesday, was acting out a one-man "voter's rebellion." In the name of campaign finance reform and "honest government," he managed to slice through the world's best-protected airspace no more molested than the birds who wheel and soar in the breeze.

Hughes turned out to be harmless--not to mention right that current campaign finance rules are a blot on U.S. governance--so thank goodness he wasn't shot down.

But why, with all the billions spent on homeland security and the special attention lavished on the no-fly federal core known to officials as Area 56, could the combined agencies--Secret Service, Federal Aviation Administration, Capitol Police, FBI--not shut down Hughes before he took off from Gettysburg Regional Airport in Pennsylvania or divert him before he reached the Capitol?

Federal officials may offer some boilerplate explanation about no security regime being truly airtight.

Still, it's not as if the authorities were blindsided by Hughes. In 2013, the Secret Service interviewed him the day after it was informed by "a concerned citizen" that Hughes wanted "to land a single manned aircraft on the grounds of the United States Capitol or the White House," agency spokesman Brian Leary told the Washington Post.

White House and congressional leaders should be asking hard questions about whether the nation's capital is safe from small aircraft, which next time might be piloted by someone more malevolent than Hughes.

Editorial on 04/18/2015

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