National Review

Making the Air Safe for Terror

Turning airplanes into safe zones for hijackers.

By Dave Kopel, research director, Independence Institute & Captain David
Petteys, retired United Airlines pilot, Marine helicopter pilot in the
Vietnam War, author of Marine Helo

September 16, 2001 9:30 a.m.

We will not allow the enemy to win this war by restricting our freedom of
mobility, claimed Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, as he announced
a series of restrictions that will sharply reduce mobility.

If one has to arrive at the airport two or three hours before boarding,
many businesspeople will choose not to fly. The immediate alternative is
driving, especially for trips of less than 500 miles, and in the long
term, videoconferencing will be bolstered.

Families with small children will find air travel even more onerous. No
longer will grandma be able to meet mom at the airport gate, and help her
take a baby and a toddler down the concourse. No longer will Aunt Joan be
able to escort her 11-year-old niece to the boarding gate. Spending two
or three hours in an airport before a flight will make travel all the
more difficult and stressful for children, and many families will choose
to vacation by driving rather than flying. Air destinations like
Disneyworld will suffer substantially in the long run.

As Glenn Reynolds argues in his InstaPundit weblog, bans on steak knives
in first class, bans on pocket knives among all passengers, prohibitions
on plastic cutlery in airports, and similar measures fulfill the
terrorist goal of portraying America is incapable of meaningful response.
In addition, measures further disarming the law-abiding on the plane only
worsen the current policy of turning airplanes into safe zones for
hijackers.

The 30-year-old FAA anti-hijacking strategy was built on the following
assumptions:

That the hijackers are not suicidal (hence the negotiating teams, etc.).

That the weapon of choice would be a metal object such as a pistol (thus
the airport metal detectors).

That the flight crew would remain in control of the aircraft (leading to
elaborate signaling procedures and delaying tactics for hijacked
aircraft).

That the flight crew should NOT to resist the hijackers (hoping to open
negotiations and resolution).

All these assumptions were rendered null and void on Sept 11, 2001.

The first people to realize this were the heroes of United Flight 93.
Thanks to cell phones, they realized that their plane had been turned
into a weapon. And they resolved to die a little sooner as they fought to
save thousands of lives, rather than to sit still and wait. What a
wonderful rejection of the advice that the gun-prohibition lobbies, the
depend-on-government lobbies, and much of the media have been droning
into the American public for so long. In truth, Give the criminals what
they want. Don’t resist, isn’t always safer. In a shooting in a subway or
school, passivity can get you and dozens more people killed. In a
hijacking, it may get thousands more killed.

Suppose that in September 1941, Nazi or Japanese terrorists armed only
with knives had taken the controls of a plane, a train, or a bus. Would
the Americans of 1941 have obeyed all the hijackers’ instructions, or
would they have rushed the hijackers en masse, knowing that some
passengers would die, but that the hijackers would be stopped? If America
is to be changed forever by the war which began on September 11, 2001,
the first change should be the end of the culture of passivity.

The most constructive step taken by the Secretary of Transportation was
to begin placing armed federal air marshals on random flights. Back in
the early 1970s, the last time that air marshals were in routine use on
domestic flights, they were often armed with .44 magnum snub-nosed
revolvers. The revolvers often carried prefragmented ammunition, such as
the Glaser round, which is composed of buckshot pellets.

The short barrel of the revolver means that the round is fired at
relatively lower velocity. Fragmenting rounds have very low penetrability
since their kinetic energy is dispersed in many small projectiles,
rather than in a single bullet, and since they are less dense than
regular bullets. Glaser fragmenting rounds typically will fail even to
penetrate a wood door.

The tradeoff is that such bullets tend to produce shallow wounds, which
reduces their ability to instantly kill or incapacitate their target.

Perhaps not too far in the future, dart guns, or other high-tech less
than lethal weapons might become practical for airplane use, but for now,
however, firearms are the usable weapon.

With prefragmented ammunition, the chance of a stray round penetrating
the aluminum body of the plane is virtually nil. With less exotic
ammunition, it is theoretically possible, but hardly certain, that a
stray bullet could penetrate an airplane’s body.

What would happen in such a case? Would the plane crash instantly? World
War II veterans may remember that B-17 bombers which had numerous holes
ripped open by hostile machine gun bullets had a legendary ability to
stay aloft.

Unlike the B-17, however, modern commercial aircraft are pressurized for
passenger comfort. Today’s commercial airliners have pressurized cabin
altitudes that climb to a maximum of around 8,000 feet (which amounts to
about 8.6 psi pressure differential compared to the outside atmosphere).

Could a couple of holes from the biggest bullets in the world about a
half-inch in diameter cause an explosive decompression? Not really. The
higher pressure cabin air would start to leak out, but the difference
between the inside and the outside air pressure would not be sufficient
to rip the plane’s frame apart.

There is only one known instance in which a bullet hole in an aircraft
frame yanked objects across the plane, expanded, and sucked a person out
into the sky. That was the James Bond movie Goldfinger. The movie was not
intended to teach real-life lessons about physics.

Should the laws of physics somehow be altered so that a stray bullet
could cause an explosive decompression, a big hole in a plane doesn’t
cause a crash. What’s really dangerous about a sudden loss of cabin
pressure is that passengers can’t breathe. The procedure is to put on
your oxygen mask and do a “High Dive” to 10,000 feet (or to 3,000 feet
above the highest terrain which means if you were west of Denver you
would only dive to 17,000 feet before leveling off), thus entering an
atmosphere that can sustain life. In fact, the altitude limitation placed
on aircraft is based on their ability to descend to a breathable altitude
in a given amount of time.

Would a direct hit on a hydraulic line cause a crash? No, because modern
commercial aircraft are built with redundancies to cover the failure of
any single system.

And even if Goldfinger were real life and a small hole in an airplane
frame could cause a crash, that is still a better result than the plane
being turned into a weapon against an American city.

We can no longer allow the assumption that hijackers are not intending to
kill thousands.

So armed air marshals are a good idea, but there are some limitations.
The number of air marshals cannot even come close to providing full
coverage for commercial flights.

How can we make it a certainty that every potential hijacker knows that
there is no possibility he will gain control of an airplane?

The most realistic plan is to apply the policy behind air-marshal
deployment on a broader scale, ensuring that every plane is protected.

Federal law has always allowed federal law-enforcement personnel, such as
FBI agents, to carry their firearms on board. Even though federal agents
have sometimes committed crimes, including murder, on balance the law
promotes safety.

The policy should be expanded to allow state and local law enforcement
personnel to carry firearms. Currently, state and local law enforcement
must be on-duty (or required to go on duty immediately upon arrival). How
stringently these rules enforced varies among airports and airlines.

What about pilots? Some have proposed armoring the cockpit wall and door,
and locking pilots in for the duration of the flight. It appears that
Tuesday’s hijackers killed stewardesses in order to draw pilots out of
the cockpit. This ploy was necessary because current anti-hijacking
training stresses keeping the cockpit secure. If pilots were locked
inside (with the key held by somebody on the ground), pilots would become
de facto prisoners a visible triumph of the terrorist objective of
destroying America’s strength as a free society. Also, the cockpit is
intended to be an exit route for passengers in case of a crash.

It is already legal for pilots and stewards to carry firearms on a plane,
if they have the consent of the airline, and they have successfully
completed a course of training in the use of firearms acceptable to the
Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. (14 Code of Federal
Regulations section 108.11.)

On Wednesday, the Front Sight Firearms Training Institute in Southern
California announced that it would offer free defensive firearms training
to certified commercial airline pilots. Front Sight’s announcement was
accompanied by endorsements from commercial pilots who have trained with
Front Sight.

Both airlines and the federal government ought to encourage pilots and
stewards to take the appropriate training, and become ready to protect
their passengers. Surely if we can trust a pilot with a $50 million plane
and the lives of three hundred passengers, we can trust him not to use a
gun in way that would endanger his passengers or himself.

Shooting somebody from a few feet away doesn’t require expert
marksmanship. In a hijacking, unlike in many situations faced by police
on the ground (e.g., responding to a domestic violence call), it will
usually be quite clear who the criminal is. There are always risks that a
particular hostage, or somebody near the hijacker, might be wounded or
killed by a missed shot. But this is still better than everyone on the
plane being killed, or thousands of people in some nearby city being
killed.

Of course some gun-prohibition advocates will object. “We don’t trust
flight crews with weapons” they may say. Putting a gun in a volatile
situation just makes things more dangerous, they insist. But Sept 11th
makes a shamble of these arguments. At least on airplanes, the best
defense is to put up no defense give them what they want, is no longer
valid. (The quote comes from a book by the late Pete Shields, the former
President of Handgun Control, Inc. Guns Don’t Die: People Do, p. 125.)

Whatever increases the safety of the flight crew increases the safety of
the passengers. No two groups of people have interests that are more
aligned.

And yes, even though stewardesses can sometimes get nasty with
passengers, they too are capable of carrying firearms responsibly.
Israel’s El Al airline arms its flight stewards and pilots.

What about passengers being allowed to protect themselves–rather then
being forbidden even to have plastic knives?

First of all, in a situation like Tuesday’s hijackings (and we can never
again assume that hijackers intend not to hit a building), then even the
most inept response by an armed passenger would do no net harm, and might
even help. In other words, if a passenger with a high-powered hunting
rifle confronted some hijackers, shot at them and missed, and killed some
other passengers, all the passengers are doing to die soon anyway. If the
bullets rip open the airplane frame, and cause a catastrophic
decompression, then it is much better for the plane to crash under
circumstances in which the hijackers cannot control it, than at the time
and place of the hijackers’ choosing.

But the risks of armed passengers can be substantially reduced. First, a
passenger who wants to travel armed should have to possess a valid
concealed handgun carry license. The majority of states currently issue
such licenses to qualified applicants.

Second, the passenger would have to identify himself at the airline at
check-in. This would allow him to carry a firearm past security. Flight
attendants would not serve him alcohol (or would serve only a single
drink). Like the air marshals, passengers would have to bring only
firearms from a list of particularly suitable guns, and would have to use
ammunition with high frangibility. If necessary, airlines could even
supply (for a fee) the appropriate type of ammunition.

If necessary, passengers who wish to carry on-board might be required to
pass a special training class related to firearms on planes, similar to
the classes required for flight crews.

Now the idea of armed passengers is extremely offensive to the gunphobics
who have spent the last thirty years inflicting their aesthetic
sensibilities on the America, and turning airports, schools, and too many
workplaces into gun-free zones which in practice has meant turning them
into criminal safety zones, where it easy to kill a lot of people
especially people who believe that the best defense is to put up no
defense give them what they want.

A second objection is that armed passengers will get irritated with
flight delays, rude stewardesses, etc., and start killing people. Nearly
identical objections have been raised nearly everywhere the handgun carry
licensing laws have been introduced, and in every single state where the
laws are in effect, these mean-spirited warning have been proven to be
false. Data from states such as Florida show that people with concealed
handgun permits are much, much more law-abiding than the rest of the
population.

Given the vast number of witnesses to any potential crime, and the
guarantee that there will be other armed people on the plane who won’t
tolerate misconduct, a plane would be an especially unlikely place for a
person to expect to get away with misusing a gun.

Years ago, airlines used to offer smoking and non-smoking flights. It
would be interesting to see what would happen if airlines began offering
armed and unarmed flights. Which planes do you think that would-be
hijackers would prefer to take?

We also know that the greater publicity given to an anti-crime program,
the greater its potential deterrent effect. The introduction of sky
marshals ended hijackings, without a single marshal having to fire a
single shot. When Kennesaw, Georgia, enacted a nationally publicized law
to require mandatory gun ownership for families, violent crime and home
burglaries plunged. Again, the announcement of a viable program to stop
criminals resulted in crime being stopped without a need for actually
firing weapons.

Of course planes are not the only possible targets of the war being waged
by bin Laden and the governments which support him. We don’t know where
they will strike next. The evil governments and groups which nurture
terrorism have so much to resent about the United States, because so much
of the United States is a demonstration of why freedom prospers and
dictatorship and dark ages theocracy fail. What we do know is that
shopping malls, schools, and other public places will be safer if
terrorists will encounter immediate opposition. Law-enforcement officers
cannot be everywhere, but an armed, trained citizenry can be. As John
Lott, now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, details in the
second edition of his book More Guns: Less Crime, the introduction of
concealed handgun licensing laws leads to a drop of approximately 90% in
mass killings in public places.

Anyone with a gun an air marshal, a law-enforcement officer, a pilot, a
stewardess, or a trained citizen could make a mistake, and there is no
guarantee that a mistake will never be made. But the nationwide American
experience of air marshals and law-enforcement officers carrying guns on
planes, the experience of the many states which issue handgun permits to
law-abiding peaceful citizens, and the experience of El Al’s flight crews
all suggest that these risks are relatively small.

It would be possible to decide to allow the armament of only some of the
categories of people we have discussed in this article. But the safest
strategy is for all of them to be armed, if they so choose, and if they
pass appropriate training and background checks, and carry appropriate
weapons. When we make it near-certain statistically that on every
commercial flight, some of the crew and a few of the passengers will be
armed, then we create the near-certainty that never again will the
enemies of freedom be able to use American aircraft as a weapon against
American cities.

We can also guarantee that allowing passengers and crew to carry the
tools to defeat hijackers will not impose massive delays on the American
traveling public or sharply reduce the utility of air travel for business
and public, and therefore will not significantly harm the free American
economy. The same cannot be said of the Department of Transportation’s’
current approach.