Ask the pilot

When pilots carry guns. Plus: Airport security and yet more TSA brainteasers.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Airlines, Security, Business, Airports, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

March 28, 2008 | On March 22, a pilot's .40-caliber handgun accidentally discharged in the cockpit of a US Airways flight bound for Charlotte, N.C. The crew member, who has not been identified, is one of an undisclosed number of airline pilots authorized to carry firearms as part of the Federal Flight Deck Officer program, created after the terrorist attacks of 2001. Investigators are looking into what caused the gun to fire. The jet, an Airbus A319, was removed from service pending a damage inspection.

A couple of days later our old friends the Associated Press dispatched a pair of wire stories on the incident -- both of which were in need of some, um, clarification.

The first article, in describing the FFDO program, included the following: "The program allows eligible crew members -- including pilots, navigators and flight engineers -- to use a firearm to defend against any act of air piracy or criminal violence."

Well, OK, but for what it's worth commercial aircraft no longer carry navigators. There have not been navigators on any U.S. registered commercial aircraft for many years.

The second story featured a rather reckless quote from aviation consultant Michael Boyd, who heads the Boyd Group, a Colorado-based firm: "If that bullet had compromised the shell of the airplane," stated Boyd, "the airplane could have gone down."

Is this true? As discussed in this column in 2004, the dynamics of a cabin decompression will differ, varying mainly on the aircraft's altitude (i.e., the amount of pressurization) and speed, and the specific location and size of any breach. However, a bullet puncture is highly unlikely to bring on any sort of catastrophe. The Discovery Channel's "MythBusters" series once tested the premise that a bullet penetrating the skin of an airliner would result in disaster. It sealed and pressurized several mothballed commercial aircraft to re-create the conditions of high-altitude flight, then remotely fired a 9 mm pistol from inside. The results were surprising. Even when a window was completely blown out, the punctures did not create larger tears in the structure, at worst inducing a manageable rate of decompression. (Indeed, photographs of the US Airways jet reveal a fuselage puncture near one of the left-side cockpit windows.)

Boyd has been watching too many movies, and it was irresponsible of the AP to include his comment.

To be fair, by Wednesday the AP had better control of the facts. The story quoting Boyd was effectively pulled; links to the original now connect to a newer and more accurate version, with decent analysis by a pair of aeronautics professors. One of the professors brings up the 1988 Aloha Airlines cabin burst, in which, despite violent structural failure, the aircraft made a successful emergency landing. I made the identical comparison in that column in '04.

Boyd's overzealous comment may have been a case of expedience. I got the feeling he was using the opportunity to express his displeasure with the policy of pilots carrying guns. On this, he and I share some common ground. I don't consider the FFDO program a dangerous idea so much as a not very useful one; its value as a deterrent is highly exaggerated, reliant on a skyjacking template that is all but obsolete to terrorists.

More on that in a moment. In the meantime, speaking of not-very-useful security measures ...

I was pleasantly surprised recently to hear the German magazine Die Welt reporting that the European Union Parliament had called for elimination of the senseless liquids and gels restrictions at European airports. Parliament members called the current regulations "not intelligent," and said they deliver "no increase of security." Most experts would agree.

If you've forgotten, the restrictions stem from an alleged terror plot foiled by authorities in London two summers ago. A gang of would-be terrorists were hoping to bring down several jetliners using liquid explosives. (Their plan was something of a Project Bojinka knockoff, harking back to Ramzi Yousef's foiled plan to bomb a dozen U.S. jetliners over the Pacific in 1995.) Following the bust, the doomsday rhetoric was hard to ignore, with government spokespeople citing that we were "days away" from a massive attack. In Europe and America, a sweeping set of rules was enacted, restricting the carriage of liquids, gels and aerosols to 3.4 ounces (100 ml) or less per container. Sales of zip-lock bags went through the roof.

Much of what we were told turned out to be hooey. Shortly after the arrests, a New York Times story revealed that the conspirators had been known to law enforcement officials for more than a year. The plot's leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports and airline tickets and, most critical of all, had been unsuccessful in producing liquid explosives. "The reactions of Britain and the United States," said the Times "... were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike." As for the scope of the attack, British officials described the widely parroted report that up to 10 U.S. airliners had been targeted as "speculative" and "exaggerated."

Among those who expressed serious skepticism about the bombers' readiness was Thomas Greene, whose essay in the Register, published a week after the arrests in London, explored the extreme difficulty faced in mixing and deploying the types of binary explosives purportedly to be used. Greene is the Register's associate editor, and has written extensively on security issues. In researching his story, he conferred with professor Jimmie C. Oxley, an explosives specialist.

Speaking with me in August 2006, Greene conceded that the threat of liquid explosives does exist, but that they cannot be readily brewed from the kinds of liquids we have since devoted most of our attention and resources to keeping away from airplanes. Certain benign liquids, when combined under highly specific conditions, are indeed dangerous. However, creating those conditions poses enormous challenges for a saboteur. "The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction," said Greene. "A handy gimmick for action movies and shows like '24.' The reality proves disappointing: It's rather awkward to do chemistry in an airplane toilet. Nevertheless, our official protectors and deciders respond to such notions instinctively, because they're familiar to us: We've all seen scenarios on television and in the cinema. This, incredibly, is why you can no longer carry a bottle of water onto a plane."

Incredibly indeed.

Next page: The 9/11 hijackers did not exploit a weakness in security, they exploited our mind-set