101 - Washington, D.C.
The Federal Aviation Administration did not collect information on licensed pilots’ religion, of course. Throughout almost the entirety of the nation’s existence such conduct would have been illegal and certainly in violation of the First Amendment freedom of religion clause.
The FAA’s frantic effort to identify Jewish pilots was but one of many examples of how far the nation had strayed from its roots. Just as following the World Trade Center attacks, Muslim airline passengers were targeted for special scrutiny or were barred from some flights altogether, now the decision was made that Jews could not be trusted at the controls of large commercial aircraft, or any planes at all.
Computers, once again, made the task straightforward, simply a matter of comparing the names and identifying information of persons who voluntarily accepted the new blue Americards with the database of licensed pilots. Approximately two percent of the country’s 620,000 pilots turned out to be Jews, almost matching the percentage of Jews in the general population.
The FAA’s concern focused on the million or so Jews who did not volunteer for new identification cards. The government assumed that those million Jews were the most militant, the ones most likely to be affiliated with terror cells. Some of those million Jews certainly held pilots licenses.
Again, computers were used to search for those persons among the FAA’s licensing databases. Algorithms were written to search for the most common Jewish names, as demonstrated by the Jews who’d come forward as Jews. Statistically, that search was expected to produce approximately 2,000 additional Jewish pilots. The prediction was close. The search came up with almost 2,500 names.
Letters were sent to all Jews who held pilot’s licenses, revoking their licenses and prohibiting them from flying. For Jewish commercial pilots, that meant they lost their jobs. For recreational pilots, it was one more indicator of how quickly the world had turned upside down.
A few FBI agents were spared to investigate these pilots, ensuring that they were not flying and that they harbored no plans to duplicate the World Trade Center attacks. These agents prioritized their investigations in the most logical manner. First priority went to military pilots. The Air Force revoked the flying privileges of all Jewish pilots. Second priority went to pilots holding commercial licenses, those trained to fly large passenger or cargo jets.
The FBI agents gradually worked their way through their priority lists. After military pilots and commercial pilots, they went to flight schools, interviewing Jewish flight instructors. Next came the greatest number of licensed pilots, those thousands of Jews holding civilian private pilot licenses, pilots trained only to fly small, single engine aircraft.
The agents assigned to this task scoffed at their duties, which seemed peripheral to the Bureau’s monomaniacal search for the missing nuclear weapon. Eventually, their superiors agreed with these agents that their time could be better spent focusing elsewhere.
The investigations stopped before they could interview every last Jewish licensed private pilot in the country.
The FBI agents never reached the small group they’d set as their last and final priority, Jews whose FAA-issued pilot’s license bore the stamp “aerotow only,” glider pilots, pilots such as Ben Shapiro.