Woods Has Friends With Clout In High Places

Nice reporting by Daniel Lopez in the Monterey County Herald to reveal the finger pointing over who asked a banner plane to move along, particularly since the FBI is getting the blame and denying they'd do such a thing.

The pilot flew with one banner and did nothing wrong, Dereeder said, when a message from the FBI was relayed though the control tower at Monterey Peninsula Airport, asking the pilot to leave the area.

"We didn't fly over the crowd," he said. "We were a half-mile away from the golf course."

Uh, then how did several people get a shot of the banner taken from the second green as Dustin Johnson was making triple? Oh, why did the crowd erupt in laughter reading the banner?

Dereeder said the pilot complied with the request to change his flight path and the second banner wasn't flown.

Monterey County Sheriff's Cmdr. Mike Richards said the request was made by an FBI representative to the FAA out of concern for public safety.

"It was a request, not an order," he said.

Such requests made to pilots through the FAA is "standard operating procedure" for large events, said FBI spokesman Special Agent Joseph Schadler.

"It's entirely a safetyconcern issue," he said. "It happens every single time, every single golf tournament that we are involved in. There's no difference in what happened on Sunday or what didn't happen on Sunday."

But FAA spokesman Lynn Lunsford said, "The FBI doesn't typically get involved in stuff like that unless there is some type of criminal activity."

Though the FBI acknowledges the request was made, Lunsford said he checked with the FAA "terminal radar control room" and found no record of the request.

"I have checked and we have no record of the FBI asking to have the pilot to the leave the area," he said. "I haven't been able to find any record at all that we had any type of request like that."