Keith Binns, a Toronto businessman who was in Washington on a work trip, was walking across from the Capitol, when the gyrocopter flew by overhead about five storeys up.Keith Binns
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night, nor apparently some of the world's most closely guarded airspace, deterred a Florida mailman mad about out-of-control campaign spending who flew his small, open-cockpit aircraft close to the Capitol and landed on the West Lawn Wednesday.
Doug Hughes, a 61-year-old postal worker from Florida, claimed credit for the stunt that – once again – exposed weaknesses in the air-defence system guarding the domed Capitol and the White House.
President Barack Obama was out of town, just as he was a few weeks ago when a government worker crashed a small drone on the White House grounds.
According to witnesses, the gyrocopter, a small aircraft with a rotating wing, which looks like a very small helicopter, approached the Capitol from the west; flying low over the National Mall, across the reflecting pool, it cleared a row of trees and the statue of General Ulysses Grant before settling on the West Lawn.
Mr. Hughes said he was delivering letters to all 535 members of Congress. Armed police with guns drawn apprehended him immediately after he landed.
"I have no violent inclinations or intent," he wrote on his website, thedemocracyclub.org. "An ultralight aircraft poses no major physical threat – it may present a political threat to graft. I hope so. There's no need to worry – I'm just delivering the mail." His gyrocopter had a logo of the U.S. Postal Service on its tail.
The Capitol Dome is widely believed to have been the fourth target for al-Qaeda hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, who seized four commercial airliners and used them as human-guided, fuel-laden missiles to destroy New York's twin towers and set the Pentagon ablaze. Passengers aboard the fourth jet attacked the terrorists in the cockpit and the aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania.
Ever since, a tight air-exclusion zone surrounds Washington, with warplanes on standby and armed Coast Guard helicopters used to intercept slow-moving aircraft that stray into the closed airspace. Despite more than a decade of warnings, incursions still occur on average more than once a week. Most are unwitting, by pilots of aircraft who are lost and don't know the boundaries of the closed airspace. There were more than 75 incursions in 2013, although most were intercepted many kilometres from the Capitol or the White House.
Keith Binns, a Toronto businessman who was in Washington on a work trip, was walking across from the Capitol, when the gyrocopter flew by overhead about five storeys up.
"At the beginning, it seemed like it had to be something official," Mr. Binns said. "I didn't think much of it." But a minute later, the sounds of sirens filled the streets and police cars rushed to the area.
About two hours after the gyrocopter landed only a few hundred metres from the Capitol on Wednesday, police said it had been checked by a bomb squad and nothing hazardous had been found.
At least one police officer was close by with his gun drawn when the gyrocopter bounced to a landing. The pilot, according to John Jewell, 72, a visiting tourist, "didn't get out until police officers told him to get out. He had his hands up."
Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, said security forces were prepared to shoot down the gyrocopter, although it remained unclear how it had managed to get so close to the Capitol
"Had it gotten any closer to the Speaker's Balcony they have long guns to take it down, but it didn't. It landed right in front," Mr. McCaul said.
According to The Tampa Bay Times, which was aware of Mr. Hughes's plans before takeoff, he told a friend a year ago of his stunt plan to deliver letters to members of Congress demanding campaign finance reform.
The friend and co-worker, Mike Shanahan, 65, told the Times: "He's not a suicide bomber, he's a patriot."
With a report from Associated Press