Pardon the Loud Noise, Captain...
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@AMF
I really wasn´t aware that fare paying passengers are allowed to board the flights with guns on them.
Having sky marshalls or trained pilots armed on the aircraft is one thing, but just passengers is another.
It makes the whole security stuff utterly ridiculous.
I really would be pissed off if they´d take away my nail cutter, my shampoo and what not, only to find out that the guy next to me is sitting there with a Revolver under his jacket.
You are absolutely right. It´s a cultural thing. I will never understand the American love and passion for firearms as a solution to everything. I just accept it as what it is - a different culture - and get on with it and enjoy the flights with my nice American colleagues, without trying to convince each other
I really wasn´t aware that fare paying passengers are allowed to board the flights with guns on them.
Having sky marshalls or trained pilots armed on the aircraft is one thing, but just passengers is another.
It makes the whole security stuff utterly ridiculous.
I really would be pissed off if they´d take away my nail cutter, my shampoo and what not, only to find out that the guy next to me is sitting there with a Revolver under his jacket.
You are absolutely right. It´s a cultural thing. I will never understand the American love and passion for firearms as a solution to everything. I just accept it as what it is - a different culture - and get on with it and enjoy the flights with my nice American colleagues, without trying to convince each other
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No he didn't.
ANY government employee who carries a concealed weapon as part of their duties can carry it aboard a US airliner.
Back in my pax days I carried agricultural inspectors, postal inspectors, fish and game officers, federal and state law enforcement, and IRS officials with concealed weapons.
It's not usually this prevalent... I flew many times to a small town in south Georgia that has a federal firearms training facility - known colloqially as "Club Fed."
ANY government employee who carries a concealed weapon as part of their duties can carry it aboard a US airliner.
Back in my pax days I carried agricultural inspectors, postal inspectors, fish and game officers, federal and state law enforcement, and IRS officials with concealed weapons.
It's not usually this prevalent... I flew many times to a small town in south Georgia that has a federal firearms training facility - known colloqially as "Club Fed."
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I for one have carried firearms on airliners in the U.S. when I was with the United States Marshal Service. As AMF posted it happens every day numerous times on probably all U.S. airlines.
Now please understand that one cannot just show up, flash a badge and jump on board with your weapon. There is an established procedure that must be followed, which I will not relate here, and the final authority is the Captain.
Personally the only problem I ever had was that when armed you could not consume adult beverages, so usually I tried to get some other guy to carry my weapon, never worked.
(To be honest I was happy when they decided to take the pilot's guns away, but then they would turn around and make us start carrying them again. Pain in the butt it was.)
Now please understand that one cannot just show up, flash a badge and jump on board with your weapon. There is an established procedure that must be followed, which I will not relate here, and the final authority is the Captain.
Personally the only problem I ever had was that when armed you could not consume adult beverages, so usually I tried to get some other guy to carry my weapon, never worked.
(To be honest I was happy when they decided to take the pilot's guns away, but then they would turn around and make us start carrying them again. Pain in the butt it was.)
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Originally Posted by Huck
Back in my pax days I carried agricultural inspectors, postal inspectors, fish and game officers, federal and state law enforcement, and IRS officials with concealed weapons.
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US Airways Fires Pilot Whose Gun Discharged Inflight
From the Aero-News Network
FFDOA Plans To Fight Captain's Termination
The US Airways captain who accidentally discharged his gun in the cockpit of an airliner inflight is being fired by the airline.
As ANN reported, Capt. James Langenhahn was suspended from the airline three days after the March 22 incident, which occurred as the Airbus A319 he was piloting descended through 8,000 feet to land in Charlotte, NC.
No one in the cockpit was injured, but the bullet did leave a hole in the inner and outer fuselage skins, the outer hole visible under the port-side cockpit window.
Langenhahn is a member of the Transportation Security Administration's Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) program, which allows pilots to carry loaded firearms onboard commercial aircraft as a protective measure against terrorism. The pilot told authorities he was stowing the firearm, a .40 caliber semiautomatic H&K USP, when it fired.
A spokesman for the Federal Flight Deck Officers Association told CNN US Airways has begun the process to terminate Langenhahn's contract with the carrier... which the group plans to fight. "This was accidental not intentional," said Mike Karn. "This is not the way to treat a long-term pilot."
A spokesperson for US Airways declined to comment on the matter, which was the first such public incident of its kind since the FFDO program was created in 2002. Thousands of commercial pilots have been trained to carry firearms onboard their planes,
The TSA is now investigating the matter... which will no doubt include the question of why Langenhahn had the gun out of its holster in the first place.
FFDOA Plans To Fight Captain's Termination
The US Airways captain who accidentally discharged his gun in the cockpit of an airliner inflight is being fired by the airline.
As ANN reported, Capt. James Langenhahn was suspended from the airline three days after the March 22 incident, which occurred as the Airbus A319 he was piloting descended through 8,000 feet to land in Charlotte, NC.
No one in the cockpit was injured, but the bullet did leave a hole in the inner and outer fuselage skins, the outer hole visible under the port-side cockpit window.
Langenhahn is a member of the Transportation Security Administration's Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) program, which allows pilots to carry loaded firearms onboard commercial aircraft as a protective measure against terrorism. The pilot told authorities he was stowing the firearm, a .40 caliber semiautomatic H&K USP, when it fired.
A spokesman for the Federal Flight Deck Officers Association told CNN US Airways has begun the process to terminate Langenhahn's contract with the carrier... which the group plans to fight. "This was accidental not intentional," said Mike Karn. "This is not the way to treat a long-term pilot."
A spokesperson for US Airways declined to comment on the matter, which was the first such public incident of its kind since the FFDO program was created in 2002. Thousands of commercial pilots have been trained to carry firearms onboard their planes,
The TSA is now investigating the matter... which will no doubt include the question of why Langenhahn had the gun out of its holster in the first place.
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Avionero @AMF
I really wasn´t aware that fare paying passengers are allowed to board the flights with guns on them.
Having sky marshalls or trained pilots armed on the aircraft is one thing, but just passengers is another.
It makes the whole security stuff utterly ridiculous.
I really would be pissed off if they´d take away my nail cutter, my shampoo and what not, only to find out that the guy next to me is sitting there with a Revolver under his jacket.
I really wasn´t aware that fare paying passengers are allowed to board the flights with guns on them.
Having sky marshalls or trained pilots armed on the aircraft is one thing, but just passengers is another.
It makes the whole security stuff utterly ridiculous.
I really would be pissed off if they´d take away my nail cutter, my shampoo and what not, only to find out that the guy next to me is sitting there with a Revolver under his jacket.
Armed federal agents and local law-enforcement officers traveling as passengers have never been a problem. They haven't taken over and killed airplanes. Unknown passengers, especially working as a team and carrying and/or improvising weapons have been. Now that the flight deck is considered to be a castle keep...protected at all costs with active resistance... and understanding that you can't always keep determined baddies from getting inside the outside curtain wall, the more potential for someone to help prevent them gaining access to the cockpit-keep before the pilots have to defend it from the inside, the better.
Why would anyone want to remove the advantage gained by having armed defenders...inside and outside the cockpit...when you have done everything you can to strip the attackers of weapons or their ability to improvise them? Cite collateral damage if bullets fly all you want, but the entire aircraft and more is at stake. The only security you're going to increase is the security in the terrorist whack-job mind that they will succeed.
If you were on an aircraft ane 15 hijackers were trying to keep unarmed pax like you bottled up in the aisle and away from the cockpit in order to give 4 more behind them time to break in, wouldn't you prefer that DEA agent or Postal Inspector or Dept of Agriculture guy have something useful in his holster, rather than having him/her be just another unarmed passenger like you trying to figure out what in the he11 to do?
Likewise, if I were a suicidal terrorist-hijacker bent on homicide, I would LOVE to know that my my fanatical, trained, and physically fit comrades-in-martyrdom team would be facing fat, young, old, untrained, and disarmed adversaries in an aircraft cabin scrap. Even one armed passenger that suddenly popped-up, however, would reduce my team's chances for success to odds too low to bother worrying about an armed pilot when the door finally breaks.
At best, deterrence with regards to suicidal-homicidal fanatics means forcing doubts into their so-called "minds" about succeeding with a particular target, not suicide itself. They can and will kill themselves in different ways...dynamite belt in a shopping mall, for instance..like we see in the news every day. They know Sky Marshalls are armed. Now they know they may face gunfire from the pilot if they manage to get the cockpit door open. Like it or not, through negligence, the US Air pilot certainly proved in a very public way that weapons really are in cockpits now, and loaded (and before any pilot here says "yes but now the terrorists know there might be a weapon up there to use against the pilots" I'll say to you that when you tied your tie before you went to work you were literally tying your own noose if you wear it in the cockpit when you fly).
So why would you take away the wild-card doubt that there may be also be armed law enforcement passengers merely traveling on board by publicly stripping them of their weapons? That NOW...unlike before when the "experts" pretended hijackers wanted to live and merely fly to Cuba....will USE their weapons against them in the cabin while as they attempt to take over the aircraft? That collateral damage is now deemed acceptable by the good guys in order to foil them in the act?
Sure, after 9-11, to them merely killing the airplane's passengers is like being 2nd place to bringing down entire buildings with it, but doing so would still make them a household name in terrorist households. But what they DON'T want is to blow their whole martyrdom-wad merely killing a few pax in the cabin during an unsuccessful attempt at either, dying in the aisle from gunshot wounds in unspectacular fashion, even if it is up in 1st Class.
The existence of the armed law enforcement wild-card creates another level of deterrence against them picking the airliner-as-kamakazi method when they're deciding the manner in which they're going to try and kill a lot of innocent people.
Once had a pax problem...don't recall exactly why the pax and I ended up having a jetway discussion.....but it turned out this postal inspector, coming home from a Florida vacation with wife and 2 school age children, was packing heat. Once I'd sorted the problem I asked him why he deemed it necessary to pack on holiday. Again, I don't recall his precise words but I remember walking back to the flight deck livid that
(1) I had no authority to refuse a pax just cos he had a gun.
(2) That anyone would want to take a gun on a family holiday.
Only in America!
(1) I had no authority to refuse a pax just cos he had a gun.
(2) That anyone would want to take a gun on a family holiday.
Only in America!
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Just a thought, would it be better to have a taser in the cockpit so that you have some option of escalating based on the threat level, rather than having the limited option of a gun, with it's potential for collateral damage? Or perhaps have a taser for the FA's in a hidden location and a gun for the pilot in dire circumstances?
Say as in this scenario:
Say as in this scenario:
LIMA, Peru - A Peruvian airline passenger tried to force his way into the cockpit of a domestic flight to read a manifesto over the plane's sound system, according to the state news agency Andina. More here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24238951/
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If you are in denial or disconnected to the modern threat of airlines as suicidal terrorist weapons for mass murder and destruction - or you are flying in a place either obviously out of range of such a target or otherwise confident that the part of the world you are in possesses no such threat, then I suppose you can feel free to decide how concerned you are about somebody trying to break into your cockpit.
In the U.S., Europe, and other target rich environments where terrorist scum hide in the cracks like cockroaches we assume the worst (that ANY attempted breach is a threat to much more than just the aircraft and its occupants) and react accordingly. Breaking into my cockpit will be met with swift deadly force, no questions asked. The taser would just make it a messy two step process instead of one: 1) shoot taser 2) swing crash axe.
In the U.S., Europe, and other target rich environments where terrorist scum hide in the cracks like cockroaches we assume the worst (that ANY attempted breach is a threat to much more than just the aircraft and its occupants) and react accordingly. Breaking into my cockpit will be met with swift deadly force, no questions asked. The taser would just make it a messy two step process instead of one: 1) shoot taser 2) swing crash axe.
Last edited by Jaxon; 22nd Apr 2008 at 08:37. Reason: taser comment
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FireLight Just a thought, would it be better to have a taser in the cockpit so that you have some option of escalating based on the threat level, rather than having the limited option of a gun, with it's potential for collateral damage? Or perhaps have a taser for the FA's in a hidden location and a gun for the pilot in dire circumstances?
Say as in this scenario:
Quote:
LIMA, Peru - A Peruvian airline passenger tried to force his way into the cockpit of a domestic flight to read a manifesto over the plane's sound system, according to the state news agency Andina. More here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24238951/
Say as in this scenario:
Quote:
LIMA, Peru - A Peruvian airline passenger tried to force his way into the cockpit of a domestic flight to read a manifesto over the plane's sound system, according to the state news agency Andina. More here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24238951/
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I guess you are more at home with hollywood movie scripts.
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(1) I had no authority to refuse a pax just cos he had a gun.
(2) That anyone would want to take a gun on a family holiday.
(2) That anyone would want to take a gun on a family holiday.
Number 2. Just your opinion.
No, not only in 'America', please read the post above re Italy by I-FORD.
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What remains to be seen is how the gun discharged while on approach. Did he remove it to show F/O? Can't imagine, if stowed properly, how the darn thing went off.
Perhaps he's the Barney Fife of US Air's Mayberry.
Perhaps he's the Barney Fife of US Air's Mayberry.
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Conde Nast Traveler pistol-packing
Conde Nast Traveler magazine continues its exegesis on the USAirways inadvertent-pistol-discharge incident here...
http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/...tist.html#more
...if anybody wants to post comments. By Guy Martin, the magazine's security expert.
http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/...tist.html#more
...if anybody wants to post comments. By Guy Martin, the magazine's security expert.
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I'm a contributing editor at Traveler (and a pilot), and that's what I've been trying to tell him since he first started writing about this, right after the incident. He won't listen when I tell him that suppositions on the part of somebody with no actual flight-deck experience are a bad idea.