Arming Airplane Pilots
It's a quintessentially American solution: our nation's commercial aircraft are at risk, so let's allow pilots to carry guns. We have visions of these brave men and women as the last line of defense on an aircraft, and courageously defending the cockpit against terrorists at 30,000 feet. I can just imagine the made-for-TV movie.
Reality is more complicated than television, though. Sometimes, security systems cause more problems than they solve. Putting guns on aircraft will make us more vulnerable to attack, not less.
When people think of potential problems with an weapons in a cockpit, they think of accidental shootings in the air, holes in the fuselage, and possibly even equipment shattered by a stray bullet. This is a problem, certainly, but not a major one. A bullet hole is small, and doesn't let a whole lot of air out. And airplanes are designed to handle equipment failures -- even serious failures -- and remain in the air. If I ran an airline, I would worry more about accidents involving passengers, who are much less able to survive a bullet wound and much more likely to sue.
The real dangers, though, involve the complex systems that must be put in place before the first gun can ride along in the cockpit. There are major areas of risk.
One, we need a system for getting the gun on the airplane. How does the pilot get the gun? Does he carry it through the airport and onto the plane? Is it issued to him after he's in the cockpit but before the plane takes off? Is it secured in the cockpit at all times, even when there is no one there? Any one of these solutions has its own set of security vulnerabilities. The last thing we want is for an attacker to exploit one of these systems in order to get himself a gun. Or maybe the last thing we want is a shootout in a crowded airport.
Second, we need a procedure for storing the gun on the airplane. Does the pilot carry it on his hip? Is it locked in a cabinet? If so, who has the key? Is there one gun, or do the pilot and co-pilot each have one? However the system works, it's ripe for abuse. If the gun is always at the pilot's hip, an attacker can take it away from him when he leaves the cockpit. (Don't laugh; policemen get their guns taken away from them all the time, and they're trained to prevent that.) If the guns remain in the cockpit when it is unoccupied, we have a whole new set of problems to worry about.
Third, we need a system of training pilots in gun handling and marksmanship. Guns require training to use well; how much training can we expect our pilots to have? This is different from training sky marshals. Security is the primary job of a sky marshal; they're expected to learn how to use a gun. Flying planes is the primary job of a pilot.
Giving pilots guns is a disaster waiting to happen. The current system spends a lot of time and effort keeping weapons off airplanes and out of airports; the proposed scheme would inject thousands of handguns into that system. There are just too many pilots and too many flights every day; mistakes will happen. Someone will do an inventory one night and find a gun missing, or ten. Someone will find one left in a cockpit. Someone may even find one on a seat in a terminal.
El Al is the most security-conscious airline in the world. Their pilots remain behind two bulletproof doors, and they're unarmed. It's the job of the pilot to land the plane safely, not to engage terrorists in close combat. For that, they rely on sky marshals, crew, and passengers. If pilots have to leave the cockpit to solve a security problem, it's too late.
United States airlines are not comparable to El Al. Our flights don't travel with two armed sky marshals each. We don't perform security checks on passengers that, while legal in Israel, would violate U.S. laws. We don't have two bulletproof doors separating the cockpit from the passengers. Many politicians see guns as a quick fix to a problem that can't wait for a careful solution.
Personally, I don't think pilots should be armed. But even if I thought they did, I still wouldn't give them guns. Guns aren't designed to be used in the cramped spaces you find in airplane cockpits. They have too high a risk of doing unwanted damage if they miss. And there's too much risk involved in putting thousands of guns in airports, storing them, getting them on and off airplanes, and keeping them in cockpits. If you want to arm pilots, it would be much smarter to give them billy clubs or tasers. At least those weapons make sense for the situation.
