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Flight school victimized by renter's smuggling arrest
A southern California flight school owner faces the loss of his two-year-old business, along with the Cessna 172 he rented to a well-known customer. The Jan. 20 seizure of N5283E and arrest of Lino Rodriguez-Chavez by border patrol agents marked the fourth arrest and seizure of a light aircraft involved in the smuggling of people, rather than drugs, since 2010. (www.aopa.org) Más...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
It's the old "guilty until (and if) proven innocent" thing.... Pretty soon some local Sheriff's Department will probably be using the C172 for its own purposes...
This is wrong. If the plane belonged to the drug smuggler, then take it... All this is doing is hurting a small businessman trying to make an honest living.
I have read many stories where drugs have been detected in arriving air carrier aircraft. Are those airplanes seized? What if someone uses a train to transport illegals (either by ticket purchase or they jump on as it passes), is that train confiscated? When a cargo ship is in port and a crew member jumps ship (entering the country illegally), isn't the ship technically transporting non-documented aliens). Are these things confiscated? If not, why, since the same violation appears to have been committed. What if the Skyhawk had been stolen, rather than rented (I suspect the rental company had a clause that the renter violated negating the rental contract)? I wonder if the FAA will investigate to see if the pilot was certified as a 'commercial pilot', since we was probably getting paid to fly.
This just makes complete sense that the government who doesn't allow individual states to pass legislation with regards to illegal immigration goes after the small business owner who had nothing to do with the crime. This is supposed to deter illegal use of an aircraft by making the rental owner responsible for the action. Do you think that they will apply this same logic to the missuse of a gun???
They choose easy targets to bully. The idea is to catch 'em before they do the bad stuff but they just don't have the brains or guts to do that. Just why this is allowed to continue mystifies me? Just WHAT is going on on these agencies?
We need racial profiling in this country!!!