Sky Marshals
Why have Pilots been Security Searched before having access to their aircraft . How many times have you ( or a colleague) thought What a waste of time ; I'm hardly likely to hijack my own aircraft .
In 1974 , G-ASGO , a BOAC operated VC10 , was hijacked in ??Dubai ; it ended up in Amsterdam where it was set on fire and substancially destroyed . My recollection is that the necessary weapons were brought aboard in Dubai by the Cleaners who had hidden the guns in their Hoovers ; and that they did this not because they were part of the original Team , but because they had been Got At by threats to their families . They simply did what they had been told to do to protect their wives and children . It was only because they were not searched - and were known not to be searched - before having access to the aircraft this strategy was possible .
Whether this is precicely true or not ( does anyone remember) is not important ; but it does illustrate the potential vulnerability of all Flight Crew to such coercion : what would You do if , say , your children had been kidnapped and the only way ( you were told) to see them again was to get a weapon on board your next flight . That would certainly be a tough one to call , but the defence to the possibility is simply to have all Crew properly searched , which is why it is done . No-one actually thinks that you are going to hijack your own aircraft , but it is recognised that might be forced into helping someone else do so . So the more public and more thorough the Searching , the better , as it shows the world that such an approach is unlikely to succeed ( and this seems to have worked)
I suspect that , then , that the carriage of Sky Marshals , who will have spouses / partners / children / parents , any or all of whom they will feel a strong need to protect , and whose exact movements will not be too hard to establish , and who will be carrying weapons onto aircraft as part of their their job actually introduces more vulnerabilty than protection .
I wonder how EL AL et al manage this problem , and how it is thought that it will be overcome on UK aircraft .