"Keep guns out of the cockpit!"
Posted on 06/23/2002 7:18:12 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
Aviation Week for February 18 says that a Great Debate – “furious, behind-the-scenes” – rages over whether pilots of airliners should carry weapons. Granted, debate in Washington intellectually parallels professional wrestling, but without the dignity. Still: Did we not just lose four aircraft, several thousand people, two and a quarter buildings, and get ourselves into an open-ended string of wars, and begin to turn ourselves into an officious security state, at a cost of many, many billions of dollars -- because pilots did not have guns?
Key point: A pistol is an overmatch for a small knife. You can probably keep guns off aircraft. You cannot keep sharp objects off. There exist, for example, hard, sharp plastic knives intended as weapons. I’ve seen them.
OK: Mahmud in economy whips out his box cutter, a stewardess shouts a warning and, as Mahmud rushes to the cockpit, the copilot opens the door and shoots him five times with a .45 semi-automatic. Mahmud ceases to be an international terrorist. He is now a carpet stain.
In fact, had the pilots been armed, do you suppose Mahmud would even have tried?
Yet here in the City of Living Tapioca, people argue that we should do anything but arm the pilots. Why? Because among the political overclass the ideological aversion to guns, and particularly to people who own guns, outweighs concern for lives.
What, pray, do we expect unarmed pilots to do? Idiotic suggestions abound. My favorite is that they should throw the terrorist off his feet by maneuvering violently, always a good idea in a 747. Let’s imagine it:
Ahmet arises, whereupon the pilot maneuvers hard. Unsecured babies fly from their mothers’ arms and smash against things. So do the stewardesses. (Exactly what one wants in an emergency: cripple the only people trained to handle it.) Heavy metal sandwich carts thunder about, crushing people. Passengers in the lavatories have their necks broken. Chaos, panic, wreckage prevail.
The terrorists, who knew this would happen, are least likely to be hurt because they will have been expecting it.
But . . . now what? The problem has not been solved. The terrorists are still there. People unbuckle, wanting to help the hurt. A mother will not sit insouciantly in her seat while her injured baby bleeds out of her reach. The pilot again violently maneuvers an aircraft not designed for it. Crash, thump, scream, maneuver wildly, crash, thump, scream
Practical.
But we mustn’t shoot the sonsofbitches.
It gets sillier. Says AvWeek,“Critics have warned that armed pilots would be more of a hazard to passengers than the remote threat of terrorist hijackings.” Oh. We trust the pilots to take off in a huge aircraft, fly it and us at an altitude of seven miles across a cold, deep, and wet ocean, and land the brute in marginal weather at Heathrow – but we don’t trust them with sidearms. What could be more reasonable?
Nice, frightened naifs say we should use non-lethal weapons. Good. Water cannon, perhaps. Rubber bullets? Tear gas? Foam? Flash-bangs? The salient characteristic of non-lethals is that they work poorly, especially in confined spaces.
Besides, I don’t want non-lethal weapons. I want lethal ones. I don’t like people who want to fly me into a large building. Killing them would suit me fine.
Sheer unfamiliarity with guns plays a large part here. I found myself talking some time ago with a pilot for American, one of apparently few who fear guns. The terrorists would take the guns away from the pilots, he worried, and kill them. The solution, he averred, was stronger cockpit doors.
Solution for whom? The passengers remain with the terrorists.
Having better doors to delay forced entry is a good idea. It isn’t a guarantee. There are ways of opening locked doors quickly. I have seen adhesive-backed charges of plastic explosive that can be slapped against a hinge. They stick. The impact starts the ignition train, and five seconds later the hinge blows apart. They can be made with no metallic parts. SWAT teams and commandos have, or know how to make, such devices.
This guy didn’t know that either. He knew how to fly an aircraft. He didn’t know squat about protecting one. And he didn’t know he didn’t know
But assume that the doors hold. The terrorists appear and begin cutting throats. First they kill the flight attendants. The pilots drive on, cowering behind the door that is their only protection. The terrorists say they will kill passengers until the pilots open the door. The pilots, now flying an abattoir, drive on – because, being unarmed, they have little choice. Should the terrorists figure out how to open the door, which is definitely doable, they will be helpless. Splendid.
But we mustn’t shoot the sonsofbitches.
The fear of depressurizing the aircraft is exaggerated. Cabins are pressurized to something like 8,000 feet, well below 14.7 psi. Even if the aircraft were in orbit, it would be only a dozen or so psi over ambient. A bullet hole would make a hissing sound. It would not, a la Hollywood, suck people out. Aside from which there are frangible bullets, hard enough to kill a man but that shatter into powder on hitting metal.
But I doubt that the American guy knew about bullets either.
Now, AvWeek’s polls find that 73% of aircrew want arms on the flight deck. Most of the public agrees. The Overclass do not agree. Why?
On a guess, because they come from the coddled suburbs and pampered universities where it is always safe, where the police defend them from human reef life a mile away, where everyone is against violence and sings Kum BaYah and dabbles in Ethical Culture. As we become more effeminate, more a nation of mall children, the cosseted just don’t know that, occasionally, it really is kill or be killed. They’ve probably never held a firearm.
And there is the curiously American disjuncture from reality, our penchant for insisting that the world is as it isn’t, and then living as if it were. We begin a military campaign against the world’s terrorists, people who avowedly want to kill us, drive aircraft into nuclear plants to poison us with radiation, destroy our cities – but pretend we don’t need to arm ourselves. We know the terrorists are Moslem males, but act as if we didn’t. We wage war on terrorists, but eject little boys from school if they draw pictures of soldiers
And AvWeek’s ominous phrase – “behind the scenes” – means that we are likely to get what the overclass wants, not what we want.
The railroad system in infinitely more vulnerable to the Muslim Mass Murderers than the airlines can ever be.
Think about it...
Granted, debate in Washington intellectually parallels professional wrestling, but without the dignity.
OUCH!
Boy is that ever a good one.
F16 pilot stating the obvious to his superiors, or to a news outlet.
"Look the last thing in my life I ever want to do is shoot down a plane killing 500 innocent American citizens. Arm the pilots or I refuse to fly the F16. You can go ahead and court martial me if you want. But I warn you that the American people will be spitting on every F16 pilot that doesn't voice the same moral, ethical commitment to honesty that I have just given you.
"Think about it guys, you're supposed to be the elite thinkers backed up with million dollar think tanks. If the pilots aren't armed and one of our F16 pilots has to shoot down a plane full of hundreds of innocent citizens it will be the government's fault for not arming the pilots. Do you really want to turn the American people against their own government? Especially since they'd have every right and legitimate reason to do just that?"
"I will have no respect for a military which allows itself to be used as a substitute for the Second Amendment."22 --William Tell
What a mindless post.
The railroad system in infinitely more vulnerable to the Muslim Mass Murderers than the airlines can ever be.
Think about it...
I've thought about it. You're probably right about the headline. Yet your comment about the article being a "mindless post": I'll let Mark Twain answer that, "It is better to sit in silence and be thought a fool than to open ones mouth and remove all doubt."
The TSA is giving waivers across the nation for people to again use those lots close to the terminals because structural engineers are telling airport officials that the terminal will survive a car bomb. The problem is that the glass will not. A car bomb from 150 feet (the distance at Ontario from the terminal) will create a kill zone of over 200 feet after the blast wave hits the glass. The ticket counters are 50 feet from the glass. You do the math.
But, the thing that is really irritating about this is that the primary resistance is being managed by a couple of liberal Democrat Clinton appointee holdovers, Mineta and McGraw. These are the guys I voted for Bush in hopes he would get rid of--instead he promoted them. I am not going to make that mistake again.
"Keep guns out of the cockpit!"
Me too. Arm the pilots - it's the only option acceptable to me or no more commercial flying - and I used to go commercial on business frequently.
From this point forward I will charter a small plane where possible, until the commercial pilots are armed. I know other people who are taking the same "charter one" route BTW.
Even more lethal are knives made from obsidian, and ceramic. They are also non-metallic . . .
Agreed.
Now the only remaining thing is to wait and see if the aphorism applies to the headline, or to my response.
Headlines tend to skew thinking into some pretty bizarre directions.
I had to bite my tongue, to avoid discussing the myriad ways that headline can be shown to be mindless.
But I suppose when the intent is to create heat, rather than light, anything is acceptable.
Now I will agree a gun in the Cockpit for protection of the COCKPIT well maybe, even I could bend on this one! If they actually replace the bulkheads with either kevlar or armor. Not for protection of the aircraft though.
Example. A flight with no Sky Marshall. Johnny Terrorist knows the pilot is armed. So he takes his plastic knife taking the stew hostage until the pilot turns over his weapon. If the pilot does not, he kills the stew then takes another. So the pilot turns over his weapon. Now Johnny has a gun!
It's plainly this simple, we can reduce weapons getting on board very easily, but unfortunately we will not stop everthing that can pen used as a weapon if someone is determined to take down an aricraft. That includes ball point pens. Unless someone can show me some facts and I have seen a lot of so-called facts, this is nothing more than really one man's pet project at ALPA. BTW, he is a pretty good shot with standing targets.
BTW, the terrorist do not care if they kill. I am sure the pilot does not want to kill or wound any of his charges of course except for one or maybe two, then again there might be three. Unfortunately and I hope I never see the day anyone of our fighter pilots has to take down a commerical airliner. But if push comes to shove, I know they will do it though that scar will not be easily healed.
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