Hi
Having read all the way through this thread on a quiet afternoon, can I restate a couple of points already made?
Our American colleague SNS3Guppy, who seems to have faded out under the weight of some fairly unsavoury anti-US posts, had one very valid point. Now that your sport / pastime / minority mode of transport has been identified as a potential terrorist threat, it is at risk. The danger is not the physical harm that can be done using a light aircraft, though even that might be more significant than you have imagined (midair with a 747 departing 09L for HK, anyone?). It is that if some incident is perpetrated, the thing that will be done to make sure it Never Happens Again is that you will be shut down by Government order - probably the next day when shock and quivering-lipped sympathy has been replaced in the House by righteous anger. And almost nobody will care. If you think that's an exaggeration, look at what happened to pistol shooting in the UK post-Dunblane (my Browning 150 went in the smelter along with about 100,000 other guns that had never seen the outside of a shooting range, but of course the Great British Public were safer thereby, and St Tony had been seen to Do Something). The time to counter this is now, before something horrible happens, and you have to do it by demonstrating how you are being active and imaginative in preventing that horrible event. Of course the politicians are wrong on this, and trying to raise a cheap headline and a bit of support from the unthinking. That's life. YOU have to counter it - nobody else cares enough.
Second, he made the point that it's all about perception. Aviation events get more news coverage. Bombs in transit vans are old hat. As an attention-seeker the IRA have done that one to death (pardon the pun). The terrorist succeeds with a new idea that catches the imagination of the news editors. To that extent, the possibility is real.
The point has also been made that an aircraft is an incredibly useful tool for evading surveillance while getting in and out of a country. Being an honest sort of chap, and not intimately involved in the Air Defence of the UK, I haven't considered it in detail, but I doubt it's very difficult if you put your mind to it, and as the politicians said, the regulation at GA fields isn't like that at a major international airport. Again, to the extent that such activity is possible, there is a real threat. And if you the GA community approach that possibility with an attitude that it's a lot less likely than several other scenarios so nothing needs to be done, then when it does happen, you will be out of runways as fast as the Government can organise it. And nobody but you will care enough to do anything about it, and it will then be too late.
It isn't fair, but it's life. Ask any ex-pistol shooter.
Sven