Questions Linger After Suicide Pilot Listed Chicago Suburb As His Home
(CBS) – Questions linger about aviation security, after officials said the pilot who deliberately crashed a plane faked his home address.
CBS 2's Suzanne Le Mignot reports from the Illinois Aviation Academy in West Chicago.
Robert Werderich is the president of academy and the 2016 recipient of the Great Lakes Regional Flight Instructor Award.
He says the FAA would be looking at how student pilot Feras Freitekh was able to use an Orland Hills address where he never lived, on his flight documents.
Werderich is commenting on this incident, as an expert in his field.
"What they are going to do is verify that the flight instructor checked the IDs of that student," he says.
An FAA spokesperson says regarding the address provided, their procedure is: to verify if a given address is a residence, by regulation, a pilot is required to report a change of address.
Werderich says after a flight instructor verifies a student's documents, the student must submit that information and fingerprints taken by local law enforcement, to the TSA, online.
After TSA approval, there's one more step on the day training begins.
"I have their IDs. I take a picture of them on the wall, match the IDs and then submit that picture to the TSA one more time to verify this is the person doing the training, and then we can commence flight training at that point," Werderich says.
