The Ayoob files: When airline pilots draw guns

Situation: In two cases, airline pilots are threatened by hijackers. And reach for their own guns.

Lesson: Commercial pilots have proven themselves competent to handle the accompanying responsibilities...including armed defense of the aircraft.

Everyone knew that after the atrocities of 9.11.01, people like us would call out for arming pilots. What few people expected was that more than half of the pilots themselves, according to union surveys, would call out for the same thing, and that legislation would be offered to make it happen.

No one should have been surprised. Our nation's commercial pilots are responsible for the safety of millions of passengers, and they have lived up to that responsibility. They are also a pragmatic lot, and they know all too well that only armed resistance could have thwarted the tragedies of 9.11.

The general public still believes that a gunshot fired aboard a jetliner that's aloft will wipe out the plane and all on board. They picture people being sucked out of bullet-broken windows like the character Oddjob in the Ian Fleming book and James Bond movie, Goldfinger. This turns out to be a figment of a novelist's fertile imagination. Pilots and aeronautical engineers are virtually unanimous in their agreement that no such thing is likely happen.

They say it is unlikely that a pistol bullet will "blow out" an entire window. Several whole windows would have to be blasted out before a plane would depressurize enough to threaten life within the cabin, they say. Even then the flight crew should have time to take the plane to a lower altitude before anyone died of oxygen depravation.

Nor do bullets through the hull cause a problem; the professionals tell us that air is circulating in and out of the plane like a sieve anyway. Bullets cutting sensitive control lines or hydraulic tubes? There is so much built-in redundancy that sufficient damage to cause loss of control of the plane is an extremely remote hypothesis.

The public does not realize that for many years, pilots of many commercial airliners were required to carry loaded handguns while aloft-- if their plane was carrying the U.S. Mail. For many years after that requirement was rescinded, a lot of pilots still took advantage of the option to fly armed. Some did so in contravention of their employers' rules, while some of the airlines merely winked at the practice or ignored it entirely.

Not until the second half of the 1980s were pilots forbidden by law to carry guns on the flight deck or into the passenger compartment, and subjected to the same rules of security screening as passengers.

Ironically, that change in regulations followed a shooting aboard a small airliner on the Pacific Coast. It crashed, killing all aboard, after a disgruntled employee used his airline ID to smuggle a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum on board. This was the weapon he used to murder the pilot and send the plane out of control. What makes it ironic is that an armed pilot would have had a fighting chance to stop the psychotic killer in time to save his own life and those of the passengers.

The irony continues. We know that it was cell phone conversations with people on the ground who knew about the World Trade Center hits that alerted the passengers of Flight 93 to their fate, galvanizing them to fight against the terrorists on board. While 93 did augur in, its crash in a remote field may have saved thousands more lives at the terrorists' intended target site. Clearly, it was cell phone access that had allowed those brave passengers to save so many.

Yet, by October of 2001, the government's National Communications System was advocating a plan to shut down cell phone traffic to "almost all but official" calls in the event of another such emergency. Had such a plan been in place on 9.11, it is almost certain that Flight 93 would have exploded into the terrorists' intended target.

Before leaving the topic of Flight 93, we need to bear in mind that we don't yet know how many of those genuine American heroes had small folding knives of their own when they went against the boxcutter-armed terrorists. Up to 3" blades on folding knives were allowed universally on American planes as of that morning, and it was a common practice to see them on board. Of course, such self-defense tools were immediately banned from commercial aircraft that very day.

Let's look at two real world situations in which armed American pilots were able to save themselves and their passengers because they were armed with handguns.

Cockpit Break-In

Five minutes prior to takeoff from Hopkins Airport in Cleveland, Ohio, a huge white male burst into the flight cabin of an American Airlines jetliner captained by William F. Bonnell. Weighing some 280 lbs., looking even larger in a leather jacket, the intruder wielded a revolver. "Fly to Mexico or be shot," he commanded the pilot.

Bonnell's first thought was, this is some kind of a joke. He turned to his copilot and flight engineer and asked, "Do you know who this fellow is?" But their stunned expressions gave him a silent answer, and the man with the gun said, "It's none of your damn business."