This is an interesting tale of government agencies working with each other, towards the correct goal, but with incorrect information. I disagree with the writer that had the report been of a stolen car that the police would've checked their facts.
Having had a car stolen, I can assure you, that the police does nothing to try and find your car.
In my opinion, the only reason that the police bothered to do something in this case, was because EPIC gave them the tip off and the Santa Barbara Police Department thought that they'd nab a big time drug trafficker. Fortunately, the SBPD didn't think to plant evidence in the plane.
What do you think?
Amplify’d from www.aero-news.net
On Saturday, August 28 at the Santa Barbara Airport, Martha
and I were held at gunpoint, ordered from our Cessna 172,
handcuffed and detained in the back of two separate police
cars.
Later, the Santa Barbara Police told us that a "private
company" had called them and reported that N50545 had been stolen
and was on its way to Santa Barbara Airport. In fact, the airplane
that had been stolen (8 years ago) was a 1968 C150J and the
registration for that airplane had been cancelled by the FAA in
September of 2005. The registration number was then re-assigned
four years later by the FAA to the airplane we were flying, a 2009
Cessna 172S owned by Cessna Aircraft Corporation. It would have
taken less than 60 seconds on the FAA website to reveal these
facts.
Apparently the Santa Barbara Police took the word of a
company they were not familiar with, failed to make even
rudimentary checks on the web, confused a 2009 Cessna 172S with a
1968 150J, and on that basis, put us at grave risk by creating a
situation that could have been lethal.
The "private company" that supposedly had called the Santa
Barbara Police was the El Paso Intel Center (EPIC). In reality this
"private company" is shown on the web as a program of the
DEA.
The concerning issue to us, as it should be for all pilots,
is that apparently nobody is bothering to remove a registration
number from the stolen aircraft list when a registration number has
been re-assigned. As a result, completely innocent citizens wind up
being detained at gunpoint. It appears that there is no system in
place to prevent this from happening repeatedly.
We had flown up IFR, utilizing a system in which we gave the
FAA our name, address and contact information and announced to the
world that we were going to Santa Barbara-hardly, it seems, the way
someone flying a stolen airplane would behave.
In many ways the Santa Barbara Police Department could feel
set up for this failure, by a system that falsely reported the
aircraft as stolen. Had it been a reportedly stolen automobile,
they would have verified their facts with the DMV before they took
action. But they don't know anything about aircraft. One officer
asked me where he could find the vehicle identification number
(VIN) for the aircraft. When I said that aircraft don't have a VIN
the officer said to me, "Yes they do." I finally realized he wanted
to know where to find the aircraft serial number.Read more at www.aero-news.net
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/9g1f
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