Fears that crop dusters could be used to conduct an airborne chemical or biological attack arose after one of the hijackers in the attack on the World Trade Center, Mohamed Atta, had shown interest in crop-dusters, Attorney General John Ashcroft told the Associated Press.

The FAA has not commented on the reasons for the grounding.

Local crop dusters weren’t surprised or alarmed by the FAA’s decision to ground their planes, but looked at the measure as “merely precautionary,” because they didn’t believe the planes would be an efficient vessel for use in a terrorist attack.

“Most dusters are short-range aircraft that are slow and designed to remain near an air strip,” said Chuck Hendrickson, owner of Hendrickson Flying Service in Rochelle.

Harold Miller, owner of Harold’s Flying Service in Leland, also finds crop dusters to be an unlikely attack vehicle for terrorists. Miller has flown agriculture planes for 42 years and ran a crop-dusting flight school for 10 years, during which he taught about 100 pilots, he said.

“If you took the best and brightest student at NIU and put him through the best commercial flight program in Chicago, he or she still would be unable to get one of these planes off the ground,” Miller said. “Anyone wishing to fly an agriculture plane would have to have formal training in one of these planes.”

Any terrorists who think they can read a manual or sit in a simulator and learn how to fly a crop duster is “just ludicrous,” Miller said. He went on to mention that there were only two flight simulators in the country that had the programming to act like an agricultural plane would.

Hendrickson believes there are planes that would be much more efficient to cause damage than crop dusters.

“There are plenty of other planes that would better suit the needs of anyone wanting to spread a chemical over a large area,” Hendrickson said.

Miller said that a terrorist also wouldn’t need the sophisticated sprayer system used on the planes.

“With the use of a pressure sprayer, a terrorist could likely do the same job from any plane & or by driving a car around town for that matter,” Miller said. “Fears of the use of a crop duster by terrorists can pretty much be put to rest.”

Hendrickson said the grounding didn’t hurt business too much, due to the time of year. He said that at this latitude, most businesses are done spraying crops for the season.

The FAA was expected to lift the order grounding crop dusters at 12:05 a.m. this morning.

Crop dusters were grounded by the FAA along with all other non-military aircraft from Sept. 11 through Sept. 14, but were not allowed to fly again when the commercial aircraft grounding was lifted Sept. 14. Agricultural planes were not allowed to fly again until Sept. 17. The FAA then suddenly grounded them again Sunday and Monday.