Last week’s unexpected escape of a door from a National Guard Chinook helicopter didn’t hurt anyone when the fugitive 150-pound chunk of metal plummeted into a swamp behind a fire station in Maplewood. But it did pique my interest into how often pieces of aircraft fall from the sky before the scheduled landing of the rest of the flight.

The answer: about once a month in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Great Lakes district, FAA district spokesman Tony Molinaro told me. “It’s really rare when it actually hits something or someone,” he said.

Last week was busier than usual for falling aircraft chunks: last Wednesday, a Delta flight took off from St. Louis with a bang, followed by a piece of a tail cone “the size of a wastebasket” fell on a road, leaving a crater. The flight landed normally and nobody was hurt.

I asked Molinaro for a list of such incidents, which are typically investigated by the FAA. He said that the agency would compile them if I filed a Freedom of Information Act request. So I went to the agency’s FOIA web site and filled out the form for the Great Lakes regional FOIA contact. I was puzzled by one of the six questions that all must answer if requesting a waiver of fees. It goes like this, “Describe how the magnitude of any identified commercial interest to the requester is sufficiently large in comparison with the public interest in disclosure that disclosure is primarily in the commercial interest of the requester.” I’m open to anyone’s interpretation of this question.

I asked for reports of falling objects for the past five years from the Great Lakes region, which covers Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. On Friday, I got an automated email response that my request had been received. I will post as soon as the machinery of FOIA renders something more tangible.

By the way, the FAA isn’t investigating the Chinook helicopter door incident, because it was a National Guard aircraft. That makes it a military responsibility, and therefore a separate agency that might have records of dropping debris.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Neighborhood nuisances. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.