FBI raises questions about foreigners at Neosho airport

The FBI has interviewed witnesses who encountered three men of Middle Eastern descent seeking to immediately buy an airplane and flying lessons at the Neosho, Mo., airport, a month before the East Coast terror attacks.

The witnesses said the Aug. 12 visitors asked seemingly strange questions: Could a single-engine plane for sale make it to London -- or, alternately, to Memphis, Tenn.? Could it reach an airspeed of 300 mph?

"There could be a reasonable explanation. I can't say what was on their minds, because I don't know. But it is strange, given what happened just a month later," said private pilot Terry Herron.

Herron, a retired Neosho policeman, said the three visitors looked at a Cessna 150 he had for sale at Neosho's Hugh Robinson Airport, and one climbed into the cockpit.

They didn't display any money, and didn't make an offer and never asked his selling price, Herron said.

"They didn't ask the kinds of questions pilots would ask, such as total engine mileage and cost," said Herron, who has been a pilot for more than 40 years. "They wanted to know whether it could get to London or Memphis."

Herron said the three told him in response to a question that they were from the Middle Eastern nation of Yemen.

Neither Herron nor the other witnesses could recall many details about the three.

Amused and puzzled

The witnesses said the encounter left them more amused and puzzled than suspicious, and Herron subsequently sold his small plane to an acquaintance in the Ozarks.

But after the Sept. 11 suicide crashes in New York and Washington, and revelations that hijackers may have taken flying lessons at small U.S. airports, the Missourians contacted authorities.

FBI spokesman Jeff Lanza in Kansas City declined comment about the accounts of the witnesses, who were interviewed separately by The Associated Press on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Al Potter, a part-time airport employee, said he and the other witnesses "have been pounding our heads trying to remember details."

"I just wish at the time that we had felt some kind of suspicion," Potter said.

The witnesses agreed in AP interviews that the three men arrived at the Neosho airport around midmorning on Aug. 12 and stayed for perhaps an hour, displaying scant knowledge of airplanes or flying.

"They wanted to buy an airplane right then and they wanted to know, could someone show them how to fly it?"' said Kenneth C. Boyer, a private pilot from Springfield who had flown to Neosho on business that day.

"We looked at them and said 'Who's going to fly?' and they said all three of us. And we asked whether they knew how to fly. And they said, 'No, you show us'."

Two veteran Missouri aviation instructors said Wednesday that the visitors' questions were bizarre.

David Card, chief flight instructor at Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg, said that "if somebody personally comes in and wants to buy an airplane, they usually know something about airplanes."

Drew Smith, director of flight training at College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, said that a prospective buyer "will usually ask the technical questions, and it's extremely rare that somebody is in a big rush about something like that."

"It could have been a total coincidence with novices, but of course everything looks suspicious now," Smith said.