The FAA is threatening to bring in the Department of Justice to issue a civil penalty against a Minnesota Indian Tribe that seized an aircraft that made an emergency landing on its territory seven months ago. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the FAA first contacted the Red Lake Nation in northern Minnesota last March by sending a demand letter to release the plane, but Darrin Smedsmo’s 1946 Stinson remains stored in the open in an impound lot on the reservation. The Red Lake Nation’s lawyer told the Star Tribune the tribe is trying to reach a settlement with Smedsmo and will release details when a deal is reached amid allegations the landing was a stunt to raise awareness about the tribe’s claims to control the airspace over the reservation. Smedsmo told the paper he’s aware of the allegations and he denied them.
Smedsmo says he was flying over the reservation last October when the engine failed. When he landed, he said his neighbor, an employee of the Minnesota Department of Transportation, was the first to meet him. His presence was a coincidence, Smedsmo told the Star Tribune. “My neighbor was standing there when I hopped out of the plane,” the newspaper quoted Smedsmo as saying. “He witnessed the whole thing. He didn’t know it was me. … He didn’t even know I was a pilot. … He called the tribal police, and they were there within minutes.” The plane was loaded on a flatbed and taken to the impound lot with the tribe accusing Smedsmo of violating a 50-year-old tribal law banning aircraft from overflying the Nation’s territory below 20,000 feet. The tribe offered to return the plane last January if Smedsmo donated $5,000 to the Nation’s Boys and Girls Club and paid the $2,750 towing bill. Smedsmo declined.
Meanwhile, Smedsmo has launched a public campaign to fight the seizure on the premise that the FAA controls the airspace and impounding the plane was illegal. AOPA and other aviation groups have become involved, and senior government officials including Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Interior Secretary Dough Burgum have been lobbied to get the plane released. Smedsmo has given numerous interviews and spoke to the Great Minnesota Aviation Gathering earlier this month about his fundraising bid to fight the seizure. The newspaper says he’s raised about $9,000 to help cover legal costs.
While the claim to airspace authority above their lands only has a chance of being entertained by Neil Gorsuch, there can be onerous laws about vehicle handling on the ground.
By the time he gets that plane back I’d expect it to have degraded some from exposure to the elements, and he’ll have probably ended up spending far more than if he’d just paid their demand and been on his way.
The original story stated the tribe had put the airspace restriction in place to prevent the development of low-level routes across their land. This article states the tribal law has been in place for at least 50 years. Since the FAA regulates airspace above 500′ AGL, this entire issue could have been resolved with an amendment to the original treaty. By the way, the original story stated the road was actually a “State Road” with an easement for public use.
Maybe a better solution would have been to pay the tribe under protest and regain control of the aircraft, then bring suit against both the tribe (for illegal detainment and coercion) and the FAA (for improper regulating airspace and dereliction of duties.) As it is now, the maintenance bill to get this bird back in the air stands to be quite substantial.
Yeah, if he’d opted to pay under protest that would have been more sensible economically.
The fact that reservations are legally other nations that have basically none of the benefits of statehood makes for silly jurisdiction games. There have been times when reservation police required your passport to enter some of their spaces.
Given it’s a SEP owned by some random dude I’m not expecting to see any particular federal force on this. But hey, who knows. Maybe they’ll send a recovery crew in that forcibly straps the plane onto a trailer for transport and totals it.
The pragmatics are unfortunate, the politics are paramount.
Have these clowns not extorted us enough? Time to put a stop to this kind of criminal behavior
To date the US has broken most of the 370 treaties established with native tribes and nations. Native tribes and nations have a long way to go to catch up with the US level of extortion.
Extortion ! Read your history All of the land in the nation was taken by coercion or force from the native peoples.
calling this incident a criminal act in comparison what the Native peoles went through not just theft by genocide is the ultimate application of trying to clear a speck out of a neighbors eye while you have a board in your own!
The dangers of landing in hostile enemy territory.
I would think to be a legal, valid no-fly zone it would have to be approved by the FAA and indicated on navigational charts and apps, etc. The only place this is published is in notebooks in the Tribal office. I don’t know if the Tribe ever attempted to make this an official no-fly zone, ever applied to have it declared as such, or just decided to declare it so, and put it on their books. Can you imagine if it was possible for random jurisdictions to simply declare no-fly zones with no FAA coordination, and no attempt to make this information known? Far as I know the FAA has sole jurisdiction over USA airspace. BTW, you can see using any available flight tracking site that thousands of planes cross this land monthly and hundreds of them are below their 20,000 foot limit. How would they even have the ability to enforce this? A final determination on this matter must be determined.
This tribal airspace stuff is clearly not legal. This tribe is picking and choosing their integration in American society, as occasionally happens in other areas involving taxes, rights of access, land ownership, compliance with local laws, etc.
If they play this “our nation” game, then they should be subject to immigration inspections when they land off of their tribal territory or their airplane should be seized as they would be if they entered from some other country. Seven months later, this is still not resolved – the department of justice and BIA need to put their foot down. (I could envision an even stronger reaction from the Aviation community to recover that airplane that would not be good long-term.)
Engine failure doesn’t seem to be anything but true. Most of those Stinsons were delivered with 165hp Franklin engines. Which seem to have a high failure rate. I’ve heard several stories of them just failing due to mechanical faillure in cruise. Unless it’s been modifed with a newer engine using an STC. Which are available. It sounds like the tribe is just trying to steal his aircraft. It serves them right to get one with a failed engine in it. There seizure is totally illegal.
This 1946 Stinson 108-1 Voyager, N8196K, has a Franklin 6A4150 SERIES 150hp original engine it.
This is messy, but t’was always so. Sovereign nations have the right to assert their borders in 3-space: laterally on the surface, above ground (airspace rights) and below (mineral rights). “Asserting” is not the same as “enforcing” however, so mutual agreements (treaties) are established with all neighbors to keep everyone equally unhappy.
History shows that such agreements are at best temporary, and subject to “renegotiation”, often by force, at the hegemonic whims of neighbors. An unenforced treaty is an impotent oxymoron. Theoretically, we have evolved as societies where such disputes are resolved with diplomacy, but the nightly news begs to differ.
The paternalistic “special arrangements” that the USA has with its embedded Native American people and their territories reflects the huge paternalistic imbalance of power between the two nations. Relations are managed not by the US State Department, but by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a relatively minor component of the Department of the Interior. Effectively, Native Americans have less clout in the US government than citizens of Rhode Island, much less a sovereign nation like Monaco.
I sympathize with their desire to live in harmony with Nature and enjoy silent empty skies like their ancestors, but they have no more way to enforce that than any other average American. What they have done is black-letter theft of property (even under their laws) and should have been rectified long ago.
Every so often, a kid’s baseball will land in a neighbor’s yard. That does not mean the neighbor gets to keep it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy11OfmehCk&t=135s
GOOD STORIES on both the Lm-1’s and the Stinson 108-1 Voyager Seized by the Red Lake Nation of Indians, Russ and Jay.
Not a lawyer, but….
States and municipalities might have a wish to restrict airspace. But there are two issues, at minimum.
There’s federal preemption based upon the commerce clause and common sense.
Then, there’s the question of enforcement. A law with no hope of enforcement isn’t really a law, is it?
Now if the tribe had a law against operating an airplane on the surface, it might be different. But you can’t just make up rules after the incident, obviously.
So, how does a tribe have greater authority to regulate aviation (in the national airspace) than a state or municipality?
Maybe a judge will think different…. Lawyers who think differently can ALWAYS be found.
What a perfect opportunity to stop with the political grandstanding and get to work on changing this (obviously) gray area in our laws, rules and regulations.
Litigate. Create precedent. Done.
If its not nationally standardized, it has not been litigated enough. 😉