The United States is about to equip its commercial airline pilots with an easy way to kill thousands of people with one shot.
On Sept. 5, the Senate passed a motion that will put guns in American cockpits. Amazingly, there appears to be very little that the Canadian government can do to stop such potentially lethal jets from entering our airspace.
Westerners must get used to the risk of terrorist attacks, and aviation business leaders and travellers are no exception. There is no way to prevent all attacks on airliners, just as there is no way to prevent all attacks against cars, but the new push in the United States to arm commercial airline pilots creates a high level of risk that Canada should oppose. More than our own air security depends on it.
We don’t allow any single police officer to tote a 40,000-kilogram bomb, and it should be exactly the same with pilots. We should not give such power to one pilot or even let him fly over our airspace.
The New York Times recently reported that there is now
little doubt pilots will eventually be armed, as the American Congress and now even the U.S. president are expressing various levels of support for the concept.
It will not happen immediately, but once the measures pass into law, all U.S. pilots will have the right to qualify as “federal law enforcement agents” (air marshals), exempting them from the Canadian laws that prevent people from carrying guns on planes. This means that American-based airlines could very well be ferrying armed pilots over our airspace.
We should be alarmed.
American pilots have been pushing for guns because they are the last line of defence against a hijacker or terrorist intruder and they feel vulnerable. It’s an understandable emotion. But emotion is not a good basis for sound decision-making.
At first, questions about guns going off in a pressurized cabin kept the pilots quiet. But these fears have now been definitively allayed (even if a bullet punctures the hull, immediate decompression will not ensue), and extensive training is planned to go hand-in-hand with the new pilot designation.
But there is still a catch that I haven’t heard discussed. What accountability will these pilots have in flight? It doesn’t take much creativity to imagine that arming pilots will make them the most lethal “federal agents” in the world.
The attacks of Sept. 11 last year show how powerful a missile-plane can be. The aircraft commandeered by Mohamed Atta, which struck first, killed roughly 1,000 or so victims at or above the impact zone. This doesn’t include dozens caught in elevators, rescuers caught in the collapse or the people on the plane.
That means a similar attack against the Sears Tower in Chicago, First Canadian Place in Toronto or a nuclear reactor in Pickering could easily kill thousands of people.
There is no single federal agent with that much firepower. Yet that is exactly what the American government intends to allow pilots to possess.
Pilots are now largely prevented from running amok with an airplane because they sit beside a colleague who knows the job of flying a plane as well as they do. To seize control of the aircraft near a strategic installation, a captain would first have to subdue his first officer without alerting the rest of the crew, and then securely lock himself in the cabin – all during take-off and landing, when they are busiest.
With a gun, this job is as easy as “pop.” Instantly, the pilot can fly his plane into any nearby structure or target.
If you think that such a scenario is impossible, I need only point to the EgyptAir Flight 990 disaster three years ago. While the official cause of this accident is unknown, the preponderance of the evidence, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s final report (www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/2002/aab0201.htm) is that the first officer, Gameel Batouti, purposefully dived the airplane into the Atlantic ocean about 30 minutes after it took off from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.
He took the opportunity when his co-pilot stepped out of the cabin. Seconds after Batouti initiated the deadly descent, the co-pilot rushed into the cabin and struggled with the controls while Batouti apparently said and did nothing to aid him.
No motive has been attributed to Batouti’s bizarre actions. But just as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teenaged attackers of the Columbine massacre, presaged 9/11 with their warnings about hijacking a 747 and flying it into the World Trade Center – two and a half years before someone actually did it – we would be remiss in ignoring the possibility of one pilot overcoming another.
I have no trouble with guns on planes, air marshals or flight attendants with stun guns. These measures make a lot of sense to me.
But entrusting a pilot with a gun as well as a plane is a recipe for disaster that must not be overlooked. There would be few checks and balances for the extraordinary amount of power put into one person’s hands.
Let’s lock pilots securely in their cabins, as the Israelis do.
Let’s screen pilots rigorously.
Let’s expose every shoe, and every piece of luggage to inspection.
Let’s put anti-missile defence systems on some passenger planes.
But let’s not go back to the days when hijackers called the shots.
Several years ago I was talking with friends, and I said that the way pilots are trained to follow hijacker demands is a massive threat to our airline industry. I said that this would eventually come to haunt us. And it did on Sept. 11.
I hope decision makers don’t ignore such common sense yet again.
It would be a colossal mistake to replace our current practice of resisting hijackers, with an armed-pilot policy that would undermine it.
Tomorrow’s terrorist could be one of the people paid to fly the plane.
