61-year-old mailman Doug Hughes flies his gyrocopter near the Capitol. (Alfredo Duarte/For El Tiempo Latino)  This post has been updated.  “What’s a gyrocopter?” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said he asked when he learned that one of those ultralight contraptions landed undetected by radar Wednesday on the West Lawn of the Capitol.  That’s a question most folks probably asked when the copter flew undetected by radar as it wandered through the most restricted airspace anywhere. The best description we’ve seen was in The Washington Post (naturally): It “sounds like a lawnmower and looks like a flying bridge chair.”  Johnson, speaking briefly to a small group of reporters Thursday, declined to elaborate because “the facts are not in,” but noted that, unlike the movie “Independence Day,” “we don’t have heat shields around our airspace.”  Various federal agencies will review the incident, Johnson said, but we “don’t want to overreact.”  Johnson was actually at the Rayburn House Office Building to speak privately to Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), the chairman and and ranking member respectively of a House government oversight subcommittee, before its hearing on why the Department of Homeland Security is a perennial last in the “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” rankings of the 19 largest agencies.  Johnson said he was “tired of people” talking about low morale at DHS — which naturally doesn’t help people feel better — and to “stop saying it’s the worst place to work.”  “I’m on top of this,” he said, adding that he was aggressively working to improve things through a 20-point plan.  (Johnson also noted, with some pleasure, that he hadn’t been mentioned In the Loop very often.)  Well, the next rankings come out at the end of this year.  Al Kamen, an award-winning columnist on the national staff of The Washington Post, created the “In the Loop” column in 1993.
"What's a gyrocopter?" asked DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson when he heard the ultralight copter landed near the Capitol.