Don't Worry: Cockpit Doors Are as Good as Police

Don't Worry, Be Happy:

Cockpit Doors Are as Good as Police

As the Captain of a widebody airliner for a major airline, I shepherd hundreds of trusting souls on every flight I take from New York to destinations across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

It is said that a surgeon can only kill one patient at a time.

A pilot's mistakes on the aerial "operating table" can kill thousands at a time, if you count all the victims on the ground at the point of impact.

I take the matter of air safety very personally.

In the news this week is a government proposal that makes me feel threatened for my life and angered by the asinine logic of it. There is a move to defund and ultimately disband the Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) program, take air marshals off airliners too, and replace them with...

...nothing but the newly reinforced cockpit doors!

Don't Worry! Be Happy! Our regulators want us to rest assured that the new, reinforced cockpit doors are all we need to restrain any terrorists who may be riding around on airliners.

Police, schmolice! Who needs them riding around for free in the first class cabins of airliners?

And who needs armed pilots, who, as police officers, are not as well trained as the air marshals? (Of course the pilots' jurisdiction is the flight deck, the world's smalles jurisdiction, and so they don't need months of training in the full range of a regular police officer's skills; they only need to know how to recognize a lethal threat to the cockpit and stop it with appropriate force, which is in the form of their government-issued, semi-automatic .40 calibre pistols.)

Now, do you approve of these pilots as federal deputy police officers who offer perhaps the last, crucial line of defense against aerial terrorists?

Bah! The regulators say, in effect, "Horsefeathers! We don't need no stinking ancient pelicans packing pistols! The heavy duty doors’ll do us just fine!"

Despite the airline deregulation act of 1978 that allowed air carriers some choice over which routes to serve and the prices they can charge, it remains true that every aspect of the airline industry continues to be ruled by government central planning and intervention into nearly every corner of the business.

To the point here, airline security is a monument to the idea that only government can be trusted to keep us safe, in the air, on the land, or at sea.

The evidence this week supports the idea that government is not worthy of such trust.

Cockpit Doors Are Open to the Bad Guys

Consider, for one thing, that it is impossible for our security system to prevent our enemies from boarding our airliners.

There will be murderous, destructive, and predatory people until human evolution reaches the point where Homo saps are happy to live and let live.

When might this happy day arrive? Sometime after hell freezes over, by my estimation.

There will be bad guys until none of us wants to use other people against their will for predatory advantage.

There will be bad guys until none of us wants to kill others over trivial differences of opinion, which are regarded as unforgivable sins that need to be punished by death.

Who in their right mind would argue that some of these bad guys will not continue to board airliners for as long as there are airliners to board?

The regulators would do well to consider a few aspects of this situation:

Just the Facts, Ma’am

The first thing for the regulators to remember is, as I say, that there are going to be bad guys boarding airliners until Earth morphs into Heaven.

The next thing the regulators might ponder is that pilots need to pee, for crying out loud, their supermanly (and superwomanly) auras to the contrary notwithstanding.

Now, remember that all the airplane toilets are located in the cabins of airliners.

And where are the bad guys?

In the cabins. And many of these terrorists travel as tribes, whole little platoons of them.

As yet we do not have air locks or dumbwaiters between the flight deck and the cabin, and we are not likely to start issuing pilots catheters, bed pans, or bagged lunches from New York to Seattle, all of which would be required to avoid opening the cockpit door in flight.

Therefore, the cockpit doors will open every time the pilots go to the lavatory and when the flight attendants bring meals and beverages to the flight deck.

Every time the cockpit door opens is an opportunity for the bad guys to pounce.

Airline Pilots As Deputy Federal Police Officers

Now, since this week's government proposals are aimed against the Federal Flight Deck Officers (FFDOs), a few facts about their program should be noted here.

The FFDO program was created almost ten years ago by the Arming Pilots Against Terrorism Act. While the law forbids me from revealing to anyone who does not have a genuine need to know whether I myself am one of those pilots, I may say that I fly with many other pilots who are FFDOs. Moreover, it is public knowledge that thousands of airline pilots have volunteered and gone through the program at their own expense and on their own time. The program still costs the government money (extracted, of course, from the hides of you the taxpayer) because the government pays for the pilot volunteers’ guns and ammunition, their training facilities, and for the instructors and administration of the program.

These armed pilots have been trained at the same federal law enforcement academy that trains the Secret Service Agents (who protect the President), the Federal Air Marshals, the Border Patrol officers, the agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the officers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, among other federal agencies. In other words, the FFDOs are trained in the same facilities and by the same staff who train nearly all the gun-toting agents of the US Federal government, except for the military, the FBI, and the CIA. To date, these many thousands of airline pilots have been trained to high standards of proficiency and professionalism. These pilots must requalify twice every year at a police academy firing range. 

The FFDOs give their service without compensation to protect millions of passengers from the threat of terrorism in the air.

As Yet No Private Alternative to Government Security

Given that the law allows no private alternative to government’s monopoly power over airline safety, I certainly believe in the propriety of the FFDO program. The idea of ending this program, in the absence of anything else, sounds like a senseless invitation to ambitious terrorists who want to take another swipe at us.

By Themselves, the Doors Cannot Keep Us Safe

The regulators argue that while the cockpit doors are opened on nearly every flight, this opening does not matter because a bar cart is positioned sideways in the aisle, and a flight attendant guards the cart before the cockpit door is opened.

By contrast, one could argue that positioning the bar cart sideways in the aisle is a signal to the passengers that the cockpit door is about to be opened!

Arguing that these precautions preclude the possibility of breaching the flight deck is as logical as arguing that an ordinary 110 pound female flight attendant (not trained in martial arts) is a good match against a quarter-ton Sumo wrestler who has the speed and agility of a ballet dancer. Consider also that the bad guys on airliners are known to travel mostly in wolf packs.

In my humble opinion, anybody who believes that these precautions can stop a breach of the cockpit may well be a ninny not to be trusted with his own knife at the dinner table.

We Need Police in Addition to the New Door

There will be bad guys on airliners until either Hell freezes over or we replace airplanes with teleporters, something like those on Star Trek.

What are the police for? To protect us from the bad guys.

Where should the police be? Where the wild things are.

Where are the terrorists?

On the airplanes!

It is on the airplanes where most of the really horrific acts of violence have happened in the air transportation industry.

What We Should Do

I have argued elsewhere (in articles for the Foundation for Economic Education) that historically all the dramatic improvements in air safety have occurred as a consequence of freedom.

It is freedom that empowers the creative spirit to dream up all the astonishing innovations in aviation technology. It is economic freedom, freedom from being hampered by meddlesome regulations and government bureaucrats, that unleashes this torrent of transformative, breakthrough technology, in every area of human endeavor, and which has so dramatically improved the length and quality of human life since the industrial revolution. It is freedom that will continue to unleash these improvements so as long as Leviathan cannot utterly block the way.

Absent any immediate political possibility of enjoying such economic and political freedom for airlines to design and run their own security measures, it would surely be a good thing to put the police--the air marshals and armed pilots--in the same room with the bad guys, namely, on the airplanes.

Surely, if there is any legitimate reason for government, it is for the police power to protect every peaceful individual's right to life, liberty, and property.

What more needs to be said than that airliners are proven to be highly vulnerable to attack, and that this is surely an appropriate jurisdiction for police protection?

The Airlines Could Keep Us Safer than the Government

Given the collectivist zeitgeist of today, which holds government to be the source of wealth and of everything else good, almost nobody but libertarians and mad dogs will believe that airlines could ever be trusted in charge of protecting their very most important value, which would be the lives of their customers, who pay them the money that keeps them in business.

We put the government in charge of airline safety because we have embraced the dubious notion that only saintly unselfish regulators can be trusted to care enough about the safety of the airlines' life blood, which is their customers.

The government has a monopoly over air traffic control too. A brief glance at ATC will provide another insight into why we seem to have ever more feeble government protection against terrorists on airliners.

ATC is another giant, bumbling bureaucratic government monopoly. These bureaucratic central planners are immune to market competition, and are thereby empowered to do the right thing, free of the selfish taint of grubbing for profits.

Put another way, with no commercial competition, these government agencies have no need to sully themselves with any groveling in the clamor and the mud of the marketplace, no need to trouble themselves by listening to the wounded cries of fickle customers.

Therefore, like the government agencies in charge of protecting us from terrorists, ATC stands not a chance of going bust for failing to please their customers (who would be us, the airlines and our passengers), so why should anybody be surprised that they don’t please us?

ATC’s inefficiency and indifference are largely to blame for the air traffic jams that infuriate passengers.

By the way, one reason for this inefficiency is the ancient radar systems now in use, which account for why ATC remains the world’s largest consumer of vacuum tubes (yes! --if anybody remembers these devices invented in 1907 that were mostly replaced by transistors, which began to enter the commercial market in the early 1950s.) Why bother buying newer electronics when nobody competes with ATC to do a better job?

There is money for airline matters like this, in the airports and airways trust fund, but this money continues to be held as a creative accounting item on that side of the government ledger that will mask the full enormity of the federal plunder.

Yet the government regulators, and, apparently much of the public as well, seem to believe that business could never be trusted to understand that you can't profit or stay in business by killing your customers. Imagine that! But business remains suspect because business is selfish, by its nature, which our culture takes as a synonym for evil, of course.

Few understand that it is this very same self-interest that leads businesses to please its customers or perish, an insight much older than Adam Smith, and which is as true today as the law of gravity. But our culture seems to have statist instincts which make many people believe that the self-interest of business would be to kill their customers and take their stuff, right? Therefore only government regulation can be trusted to prevent this predatory nature of business.

Gotta have those angelic regulators in the government to tell us all what to do and how to do it! They know better than we!

Why do we need to be bossed around by Leviathan? Because, they argue, it takes nothing less than the elevated and saintly wisdom of government bureaucrats to intervene against the selfish, grasping, predatory, evil, profit seeking machinations of business people.

Now the regulators are saying that we should take the police off the planes, including the volunteer airline pilots, because it costs good money that could be put to better uses (such as, the cynical might imagine, rewarding special interests with favors for their votes, which help to increase government power.)

Never mind that, compared to the federal air marshals, the FFDOs serve as a cheaper last line of defense against terrorists, whom we know to be riding around in the cabins of airliners.

I say that the airlines, left to their own devices, and by the dynamics of the free market, would do a far better job of protecting us from aerial terrorism than government bureaucrats, especially those ninnies among them who think that police officers are unnecessary ornaments on airliners.

But in today's political climate, having airlines run their own security system is not an option.

If Doors Are As Good As the Police ...

If it is true, according to the undiluted wisdom of our angelic government rulers, that reinforced cockpit doors are as good as police officers at restraining the bad guys on airliners, then, by this logic, why should we bother with having police in our neighborhoods?

After all, we have good locks on our doors! The doors will keep us safe! Right?

I say, by this logic, let the President and the Congress dispense with their own Secret Service police officers, on the assumption that the locks on their doors are all they really need to keep the bad guys at bay.

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revised 2012.0810