"To provide for the common defense ... and secure the Blessings of Liberty ..." - Preamble, United States Constitution, September 17, 1787

AMI is clearing out the skies over Washington to keep that infrastructure free of aerial threats. In today's world, "aerial threats" really means terrorists, a form of tyranny that our Founding Fathers, for all their vision, probably never imagined.

The uninitiated might think that air traffic over the nation's capital consists primarily of planes flying into and out of the region's three commercial airports, Dulles International and Reagan National in northern Virginia and Baltimore-Washington International in Maryland.

But that's not even close.

For one thing, AMI's mission covers general aviation - private planes - and not commercial flights. And that critical perimeter contains some 200 landing facilities' private and public-use airports, airstrips, seaports, and heliports, all of which handle a mix of recreational, charter, cargo, corporate, and even government missions.

Thus, within just 30 miles of the U.S. Capitol, a shorter distance than many of us travel to our jobs, "you could have as many as 400 planes in the air at any one time," says Stallworth. Looking at a pre-9/11 aerial map of that 34-mile perimeter, the unpracticed eye sees what looks like a cluster diagram - a chart loaded with so many dots, each representing a private plane, that one wonders how they don't all collide. Try finding an aerial threat in a crowd like that.

We tag ´em, they bag ´em
Before January 2003, patrolling the most critical airspace in the United States fell to the Department of Defense (DOD), which still retains the power of force - the force of last resort, according to one military official.

But an incident in June 2002, when a Cessna accidentally strayed into restricted airspace, revealed that DOD could benefit from lower, slower, more agile assistance. The Customs Service's (now Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) smaller, cheaper-to-operate aircraft, which had been patrolling the southern border for more than 30 years successfully intercepting crafty drug smugglers, made the perfect partner. Think cornerback versus defensive tackle. Darrell Green v. William "Refrigerator" Perry.

This drug-interdiction experience gave AMI a wealth of transferable skills: The southwest border is 1,989 miles long; three decades have given its pilots, air-enforcement officers, detection-system specialists, and air support crews the ability to distinguish, almost instantly, "the good guys from the bad," says Stallworth.

When the air branches first started business, there were some 7,000 illegal intrusions a year along the southwest border. They may not all have been drug smugglers, but they were aircraft that didn't belong there.

By the early 1990s, AMI had trimmed that number by almost 90 percent. Now, apply those same skills and knowledge to aerial threats elsewhere, and, well, you do the math.

In its first two months and four days, from the day AMI got the new assignment through the end of March, AMI tracked 141 incursions into the 34-mile perimeter; it sent planes to investigate - it "launched," in pilotspeak - in 75 percent of those cases. Not only were none of the intrusions "targets of interest," they were barely matters of interest at all - no bad guys. Good news for AMI, if not for readers wanting a juicy air-interdiction story.

In the earliest days of our democracy, John Quincy Adams wrote, "Posterity, you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."

His generation helped posterity do that by leaving one of civilization's most enduring tools of statecraft: the United States Constitution, the world's oldest living instrument of democratic governance. The core of the Constitution is its system of checks and balances: three separate branches of government - a high court, a legislative body, and a chief executive, collectively known as the balance of powers.

These separate, distinct powers were intended to prevent "the accumulation of power ... in the hands of [any one person or group, which is] the very definition of tyranny."* And preventing tyranny was, you might say, the young democracy's mission statement.

Fast forward a couple of centuries. Today's aviation culture applies a variety of terms to the 34-mile perimeter. To pilots, it's the ADIZ - the Air Defense Identification Zone. To government officials, it's the no-fly zone. But Stallworth's description is best of all; he says, "it's where the Constitution lives." Inside this circle are the men and women who preserve our way of life, enabling the rest of us to make good use of that freedom.

*James Madison, Federalist Paper, No. 47.

Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

DHS Blackhawk helicopter patrols skies over the Jefferson Memorial.