Landing a pair of Aeronca Champs on a frozen lake and going to lunch sounds like a pretty great idea to me. As little fuel as those planes burn, it probably was only a $50 hamburger. Unfortunately, a pair of Minnesota pilots made the news by doing so a couple days ago. Minneapolis' wcco.com has an article and a video of their newscast about the event in their "crime" section. What the pilots didn't know was that it's illegal to land an airplane where they did.

The aircraft landed on Lake Calhoun in the middle of Minneapolis. They went to a nearby burger joint and found the police and the FAA waiting when they got back. Apparently a Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Department ordinance prohibits landing anywhere in city parks.

The FAA gave the planes and pilots a ramp check to "make sure they could take off." The police issued the pilots tickets...with a possible fine of up to $1000.

In their defense, it is legal to land on most lakes in Minnesota...just not those in city parks. FAR 91.103 lists required preflight actions and as far as I can tell, "review of obscure local ordinances" is not specified. As such, I think the FAA would have a hard time bringing any action against them. I suppose the city parks division has that right, but their ordinance seems a bit out of place. Minnesota overall is known as a pilot-friendly place and I have a hard time understanding why they'd want to ban pilots from lakes in town...so long as those pilots are doing everything else by the rules. It'd be nice if this would prompt the city of Minneapolis to re-think their ordinances. We can hope, right?

If this ends up costing these pilots some money, it'll be because they failed to plan sufficiently for their flight and research the requirements for landing where they did. Although checking local laws isn't covered in the FARs, I suppose it's one of those graduate-level flight planning tasks that we have to be responsible for if we want to take our airplanes to uncommon places.

When I get ready to fly, my last line of defense is the WANTS check. It stands for:

• Weather
• Activate flight plan
• NOTAMS (I put TFRs here too)
• TOLD (Takeoff and Landing Data for the aircraft and airfield
• SIDs/STARs/Stuff (charts, lunch, sunglasses, etc.)

Though it isn't perfect, It's a pretty useful memory aid. There are a couple places here that 'Check Local Laws' could fit. It's not something that needs to be checked for every flight, but for something unusual like landing on a lake inside city limits I guess it has to be done. Make sure you run your version of the WANTS check before you fly...at the very least it could save you some money.