That’s an understatement. I’m not talking about an Air Marshal either; I’m talking about training scenarios that use armed pilots during takeover simulations.
People don’t seem to understand the demonstrated fact that if an attacker can get within four to five feet of you in an enclosed space you will never get the chance to draw your weapon. Well, you will get something on the order of a little less than 4%, but that decreases to 0% when you consider whether they actually got a chance to discharge a round.
A lot of people either haven’t thought things through clearly or don’t understand that training programs have been in the works since before the buildings fell on 9/11 and that the results using armed pilots have not been encouraging at all when faced with trained opponents.
I suspect a lot of them also thought throwing billions of dollars away federalizing the screeners was going to accomplish something too.
What makes you think that the pilots are going to wait until a hijacker actually opens the door? As soon as they hear someone trying to get through that cockpit door without first calling on the interphone I would expect that they will have their weapons in their hands and be calling the stewardess to verify what is going on.