Appeals court upholds search that led to pilot’s Kansas City pot bust

A rookie pilot from California should have kept on flying instead of making an unscheduled landing in Kansas City.

He couldn’t take off again after another rookie — a police dog named Ezee — caught a whiff of what he was carrying in his small plane.

In her first field assignment, Ezee alerted officers to more than 30 pounds of marijuana that Quincy L. Jackson had on board.

Jackson fought the legality of the search that led to his 2012 arrest, but on Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld the search and Jackson’s conviction for possessing marijuana with the intent to distribute.

At the time of the incident, Jackson, 36, had had his pilot’s license for less than a month. The 1963 Piper Cherokee he was flying had been registered to him for five months.

According to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Jackson had filed a flight plan from Wichita to Jacksonville, Ill., but landed instead at the Wheeler Downtown Airport.

That raised the suspicions of Homeland Security agents who contacted airport police and requested a drug-sniffing dog.

Police arrived with Ezee, who had scored a 97 percent success rate in training, according to court documents.

Based on the dog’s indication of drugs, agents obtained a search warrant for the plane and arrested Jackson at the Kansas City hotel where he was staying.

In addition to receiving a one-year prison sentence, Jackson lost his pilot’s license and had to forfeit his plane to the government.

This story was originally published January 28, 2016 at 2:54 PM with the headline "Appeals court upholds search that led to pilot’s Kansas City pot bust."