Mr. President, today I rise to introduce the Ultralight Aircraft Smuggling Prevention Act, legislation that will crack down on smugglers who use ultralight aircraft, also known as ULAs, to bring drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border. I am pleased to be working on this in a bipartisan manner with Senator Heller, who introduced a very similar bill last year in the House with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That bill passed overwhelmingly by a 412-3 vote. I hope we can have a similar bipartisan result here in the Senate.
ULAs are single-pilot aircraft capable of flying low, landing and taking off quickly, and are typically used for sport or for recreation. However, because of increased detection and interdiction of more traditional smuggling conveyances, ULAs have increasingly been employed along the Southwest border by Mexican drug trafficking organizations to smuggle drugs into the United States.
The use of ULAs by drug smugglers presents a unique challenge for Border Patrol and prosecutors. Every year hundreds of ULAs are flown across the Southwest border and each one can carry hundreds of pounds of narcotics. Under existing law, ULAs are not categorized as aircraft by the Federal Aviation Administration, so they do not fall under the aviation smuggling provisions of the Tariff Act of 1930. This means that a drug smuggler piloting a small airplane is subject to much stronger criminal penalties than a smuggler who pilots a ULA.
Our bill will close this unintended loophole and establish the same penalties if convicted--a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $25,000 fine--for smuggling drugs on ULAs as currently exist for smuggling on airplanes or in automobiles. This is a common sense solution that will give our law enforcement agencies and prosecutors additional tools they need to combat drug smuggling.
The bill would also add an attempt and conspiracy provision to the aviation smuggling law to allow prosecutors to charge people other than the pilot who are involved in aviation smuggling. This would give them a new tool to prosecute the ground crews who aid the pilots as well as those who pick up the drug loads that are dropped from ULAs in the U.S. Finally, the bill directs the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to collaborate in identifying equipment and technology used by DOD that could be used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to detect ULAs.
In addition to Senator Heller, I am pleased to be joined by Senators Bingaman and Feinstein in introducing this legislation. I urge my colleagues to support the Ultralight Aircraft Smuggling Prevention Act.