Secret 'no-fly zone'?
Secret 'no-fly zone'?
Pilot seeks answers after arrest
By Sarah Brown
Pilots returned, one by one, to Bermuda High Soaring in Jefferson, S.C. By about 5 p.m. on July 26, 2012, the lift had died and everyone had returned to the gliderport—everyone except Robin Fleming. No one remembered hearing from Fleming since 1:30 or 2 p.m., and Jayne Ewing Reid, co-owner and chief tow pilot of the glider club and commercial operation, was worried.
She called pilots who lived in the region and asked them to try to contact Fleming on their handheld radios. She flew the club’s Piper Pawnee in the direction of Fleming’s last known radio call, but found no evidence of the missing glider or its pilot.
“This is when you get that feeling that something’s not right,” she said. Fleming always called if he landed out. Worried that something had happened to Fleming, an avid glider pilot and instructor at Bermuda High, Jayne Ewing Reid and business partner Frank Reid decided to file a missing airplane report. Neither suspected that Fleming was in trouble with the law.
Fleming, 70, had been arrested for breach of peace after flying his Rolladen-Schneider LS8-18 sailplane noiselessly over the H.B. Robinson Nuclear Generating Station at an altitude of 1,518 feet msl—by his estimates, about 1,000 feet over the power plant’s dome—on his way to search for lift at nearby Lake Robinson.
No airspace restrictions were printed on sectional charts; no notam marked the area off-limits. When a woman at Hartsville Regional Airport relayed over the Unicom that law enforcement wanted him to land, he had flown to that airport and landed, greeted by a swarm of law enforcement vehicles.
Nonetheless, Fleming spent the night awake in a cell with 11 other inmates. The next afternoon, still in custody, he discovered the details of the charges: “flying very close to the nuclear plant dome in a ‘no fly zone,’” “escalated a multi-jurisdictional call out to a homeland security situation,” “ordered several times to land,” “causing the disturbance throughout the community.”
He finally left the detention center 24 hours after his arrest, exhausted and eager to clear his name. The charges were dropped the next month, but now Fleming wants to make sure no other pilots are subjected to a similar ordeal.
The arrest
Fleming took off from Bermuda High Soaring in Jefferson, S.C., at 12:41 p.m. that day, towed to 2,000 feet agl by one of the private airfield’s Piper Pawnees. He had intended to fly to Asheboro, N.C.; Dillon, S.C..; and Winnsboro, S.C., to complete a 500-kilometer course, but in soaring one goes where the lift is. A flight recorder installed in the aircraft for record attempts and competitions shows Fleming’s circling course as he searched for thermals to the east. He had looped down to Bennettsville, S.C., he said, when he decided to head home. The path back to Jefferson, traveling from one small airport to the next in case the lift died down, would take him near Hartsville Regional Airport—and the H.B. Robinson Nuclear Generating Station, two nautical miles away.
He approached Hartsville from the north at 3,100 feet msl, flying southwest toward Lake Robinson to look for lift. He had been up to 5,000 feet earlier in the flight, and knew that it went up that high if he could find it. He just had to get high enough to glide back to Bermuda High.
On the Charlotte sectional chart, the nuclear power plant is marked with nothing more than a group obstruction symbol. Fleming was familiar with the post-9/11 notam that advises pilots to avoid flying near facilities such as power plants “to the extent practicable,” but he thought nothing of a single pass over the Robinson facility on the west side of the lake as he headed toward where he thought there would be lift at the lake. If he couldn’t find a thermal there, he thought, he might have to land at Hartsville.
At Hartsville Regional Airport, Wendy Griffin was monitoring the Unicom. Griffin said the people at the power plant sometimes call her if they see an aircraft flying nearby to ask her who’s flying and why the aircraft is there. (One time, she said, she got a call about a helicopter lingering in the area and found out from the pilots that they were working for the power plant.) Sometimes she calls the pilots on the frequency to find out their intentions, but on July 26 she saw that it was a glider and didn’t think much of it, she said.
“I said, ‘Well, I really don’t think it’s a threat,’” she said. “’I wouldn’t worry about it.’”
Someone did worry about it. A little before 5 p.m., Griffin said, a couple of police cars rolled up. When the officers came in, she added, she said she’d try to reach the aircraft on the radio.
Looking for lift over Lake Robinson, Fleming was switching between the Bermuda High frequency and Hartsville Unicom to monitor local traffic. He later recalled that during one switch to Hartsville, he heard the end of a transmission mentioning a glider over the nuclear plant. He responded that he was circling and moving away from the plant, he said. He found a thermal, he said, and began climbing to return to Bermuda High.
Fleming recalls that at some point someone requested he land at Hartsville, but then he was told he could continue. He climbed to 3,100 feet msl, circling to the northeast away from the lake, and planned to head back to Bermuda High Soaring; but he lost lift and descended to 1,900 feet msl. He turned toward Hartsville again, but found a thermal and climbed to 2,740 feet. “All I needed was another few hundred feet” to return to Bermuda High, he said. But he received a radio transmission for Hartsville telling him to land.
At the airport, Griffin said the officers on the scene told her to demand the glider land at Hartsville, but that an FAA official on the phone said the FAA was not demanding he land. So, she said, she gave Fleming a choice: “Police officers here are asking you to land, but the FAA says you do not have to land. I’m leaving this up to you.” Fleming said to tell the officers he’d be there in a minute, she recalled.
These accounts seem consistent with the Darlington County Sheriff Department’s incident report. Capt. Joyce C. Everett wrote that the suspect was “advised” to land at Hartsville, and that he had advised he was going to land elsewhere because he didn’t want to have his airplane towed. When he was instructed again to land in Hartsville, Everett wrote, he did. In a supplementary report, Sgt. Christopher J. Pittman wrote, “It is unclear as to exactly how that radio conversation went, but the pilot initially stated that he intended to land at Bermuda High landing strip in Jefferson, SC. After it was made clear that law enforcement expected him to land in Hartsville the pilot stated that he would comply.”
The arrest report, however, paints a different picture, alleging that Fleming “had to be ordered several times to land” before he complied. Griffin strongly contests this version of events: “I was the only one on the unicom with him,” she said. “I never demanded him to land.”
As Fleming landed, Griffin said, about four police cars chased the nonpowered craft down the runway, lights flashing. The glider came to a full stop at 5:11 p.m.
Officers approached the aircraft and requested Fleming’s identification and pilot certificate, searched his pockets, subjected him to a pat-down, and took his wallet, cellphone, glasses, and sunglasses, according to Fleming’s account. He asked to call the people waiting for him at Bermuda High to tell them where he was, he said, but was denied. He was told he should consider himself under arrest, he recalled.
“’Haven’t you heard about 9/11?’—that’s what they said to me.”
‘No I’m not kidding’
Later that evening, Jayne Ewing Reid emailed the pilots she had asked for help in the search for Fleming, with news from the FAA: “9:02 pm – Robins plane is reported to be at Hartsville Airport.” There was still no word of its pilot.
Frank Reid called Hartsville Regional Airport and got the surprising news. Jayne Ewing Reid said she was relieved to know Fleming wasn’t in a field somewhere, but still in disbelief.
“Robin is OK !!” she wrote at 9:17 p.m. in an email to the pilots she had updated earlier. “He is in jail. No I’m not kidding.”
Jayne Ewing Reid spoke with Fleming a little later when he was able to make a collect call from his cell, and Frank Reid looked for a lawyer. Fleming’s friends were baffled that the mild-mannered pilot could arrive at such a fate.
“That boy has never had a ticket,” Frank Reid said. “… He is the most laid back and gentle person I have ever seen in my life.”
Breach of peace
The arrest warrant referred to a “no fly zone.” The incident report said that “a glider or drone had infiltrated the restricted airspace over the H.B. Robinson Nuclear Power Plant.” But Fleming knew nothing on the FAA sectional charts prohibited him from flying there.
From flying competitions in the area, he knew that the Savannah River Site, a 310-square-mile Department of Energy industrial complex that handles nuclear materials in support of national defense, is marked on sectionals with a notice requesting—not requiring—that pilots avoid flight at and below 2,000 feet msl in the area. If a nuclear site as large as Savannah River didn’t prohibit overflight, how could the area around the Robinson plant be restricted—especially if nothing said so on the charts?