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Fears of
Armed Pilots Unfounded Fears of Armed Pilots Unfounded
by Angel Shamaya Nothing would better serve to deter
skyjackers than to know that once they get to the cockpit, they are going to
get shot and fail at their mission. The vast majority of the opinion columns
being printed by newspapers around the country are just that -- opinion -- and
opinions have no good purpose in a decision that must be made based on facts.
We hear people telling us that an
airplane is going to be shot down by a handgun even though Certified Airline
Mechanics and Engineers tell us this is not the case. Airplane-safe ammunition
has been around for many, many years. Even in a worst-case scenario of an airplane
window being shot out -- highly unlikely if airplane-safe ammunition is used
-- Boeing's planes can handle just fine with a missing window.
And most systems on planes today
have redundant backup -- as one of our pilots put it, a bulldozer with wings.
We hear people telling us that we'll have "shootouts in the sky,"
but nobody is talking nationally about arming terrorists, so they'd be taking
a plastic knife to a gunfight and eating a bullet when they foolishly attempted
to commandeer an armed cockpit. And for those who honestly believe a jihad warrior
is going to try to hijack a gun-defended cockpit with a plastic knife, let's
do take note of the fact that these terrorists are smarter than that, even if
today's fear-mongering anti-gun forces are not.
We hear people telling us that a
terrorist is going to take a gun from a pilot and use it against him. A turn
to physical science is in order. Look at the size of a cockpit door on commercial
planes today and tell us how far through that door an unauthorized person would
get and how difficult a target he would be from four feet away. Airplane-safe
ammunition wouldn't go through him any more than he'd get through a cockpit
door. In other words, a terrorist coming through a cockpit door would not only
be a fish in a barrel, he'd be a bullet-stop, as well. A Sky Marshal in the
rear of a plane is at much greater risk of having his/her weapon stolen and
used against him than a pilot would be, several times more likely, in fact.
Ignore the many emotion-laden ploys
from those who do not want to admit that guns in the hands of our pilots are
the single most effective deterrent against skyjackers. Their lack of logic
and fact presses us to question their intelligence and distrust their motivations.
The probable result of even multiple
terrorists attempting to take a gun-defended cockpit are very simple: dead terrorists
on the floor outside the cockpit door, and a need to replace some carpet. It
may happen once, but it won't happen twice -- because those who downed our World
Trade Center buildings do not wish to die in disgrace, and that is the best
result they could hope for if they tried to overtake an armed pilot.
Angel Shamaya To Get Your Letters Printed Here |
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