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.

* * *
revised 2012.0810

Mastering the Chopin Etudes

My mantra is that if only I can live long enough I will master the Chopin Etudes.  I have been saying this for decades now, in a spirit that reveals more hope than conviction ... until now.

There are many things I've been learning that buoy my belief that such mastery is still open to me, most recently with Chuan C. Chang's wonderful book on the Fundamentals of Piano Practice, but today I had a particularly wonderful breakthrough that I will describe below.

 
Abby Whiteside, a famous piano pedagogue of the first half of the 20th century, wrote an influential essay called Mastering the Chopin Etudes, those formidable knuckle busters, the mastery of which is commonly regarded as a kind of union card for would-be concert pianists.  I enjoyed the essay but it did not guide me very precisely or profoundly in my desire to master those 27 daunting and beautiful pieces.

First allow me a word about my musical background.  I was given an early start at music, thanks to my parents, who were symphony string players.  They enrolled me in a Dalcroze Eurhythmics class when I was not much bigger than a toddler, and then put a violin under my chin when I was five.  I started piano lessons at six with an Austrian Countess, a forbidding and regal grande dame.  Madame Altswader was said to have known Brahms when she was a little girl.  At my first lesson, when my eager attention wandered, she rapped me across the knuckles, and I was so astonished and offended that I rapped her back!  Madame stormed out of house, aghast at such an insubordinate and cheeky child.  No doubt I was a product of Doctor Spock's permissiveness which so steered the parents of Baby Boomers to allow their children to develop an attitude of laziness, lassitude, and lack of respect for authority.  

While I worked at music in a desultory and distracted way throughout my childhood, I did not practice much, and I had not a clue about what animates music, not in any technical sense, until I was well into my twenties.  I could play some hard licks, and I was genetically doomed to be musical, but I knew nothing essential about the bones and muscles under the skin of music.  While I liked music as a child, I was really crazy about airplanes, not music.  The music bug bit me only when I was in my late twenties, after I came across a copy of Ward Cannel and Fred Marx's How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons, (surely one of the greatest titles of all time), which gave me my first glimmer of insight into how music really works, and inflamed a love for music like a virulent infection.  

When I went back to school, after the Army, after my corporate jet job in Saudi Arabia, and then, back in the States for another couple years until the last dirtbag commuter airline went bust, it was to New College of Florida, at Sarasota, where I majored in piano performance and composition.  By 30 I had finally begun to grasp some music theory and learned to play all my scales and arpeggios, but by the time I entered my first music competition, I was already nearly too old to be allowed to enter any more contests.  When I graduated from college, I suddenly remembered unhappily that man needs to eat, so I went back to flying, got married, had kids, and continued to work at music when I could. 

Now, back to my mantra that if I can but live long enough I will master the Chopin Etudes, and the wonderful breakthrough I experienced today.

William Westney, author of The Perfect Wrong Note, a book I got as a gift from my younger daughter, makes a distinction between what he calls honest mistakes and careless mistakes, when we're making music. 

The careless mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.  For example, as we're sailing through a piece of music we play a wrong note without attending to the mistake.  Perhaps we're thinking, well, I'll get it right next time.  Or maybe we even go so far as to stop ourselves and then play the right note after missing it, but we play it right just the one time before moving on. 

What we learn from this kind of mistake is a practiced routine.  The routine we learn is to play the wrong note and then the right one.  So when we perform the piece, sure enough, we have learned to play what we have practiced, which is first to play the wrong note and then the right one.

The honest mistake, by contrast, may happen the same way--we miss, say, the F sharp and land on G instead.  But this time we attend to the mistake, we bring it  fully into focus and figure out what's going wrong and how to play the right note.  Maybe we approach the troublesome spot by a few notes before it and try to notice what is going wrong and how to play the right note, and then we practice the right note again and again and again until we get it firmly in our hands and with a fully mindful grasp.

I had such a moment this morning.  There was a spot in "I Never Saw a Moor," a beautiful contemporary song by Richard Pierson Thomas that sets to music a text by Emily Dickinson.  I was approaching the repetition of the text at a big cadence from the dominant to the tonic of D flat, where the left hand goes from low A flats to a repeated E flat above it with an arpeggio following.  I play the E flat first with the 2nd finger and then with the 5th finger.  I kept missing the E flat when I switched from 2 to 5.  

I stopped and attended to the mistake and figured out what's going wrong and more importantly how to fix it.  

Well, there are two points here: the first one that I've learned recently, which is that when making a leap, it helps to move the hand very rapidly into position above the right note and then to descend on to the note, in contrast to trying to make the leap in just one motion and land on the note while still going sideways.  It is counter-intuitive to think this two-step motion is better, but this is indeed what I've learned from wrestling with those long, awful, and intimidating series of leaps in the first movement of the Brahms E minor cello sonata that I'm playing with my daughter.

Now, the second thing, and what occurred to me this morning, is that I can always play a black note with 5 if it's as an octave with 1. 

Think about that.  Aha!  Now I get it! 

While it's easy to play a black key with the 5th finger when the music is slow, at a lively tempo, I find that I can reliably play a black note with 5 when my fingers are stretched out, meaning, to the point here, when the long axis of the 5th finger lies across the black key, not lined up with, or parallel to the long axis of that narrow key.  By playing the black note with the little finger across the note I suddenly have, in effect, a bigger finger with which to find the narrow key .  

This insight makes it as if the key had suddenly been increased in size to make a much easier target to hit because, in effect, it is indeed bigger!  You're aiming at a target as wide as the key is long, not at a target which is only as big as the narrow width of the black key.  

It was as if I were trying to play tennis with a baseball bat and suddenly I get a real tennis racket instead! 

When I figured this out, I immediately applied the idea to a trouble spot in the C major Etude of Chopin from the first book, Opus 10.  Suddenly I could apply it to countless other trouble spots in the piece, and then ... my God, I've had a breakthrough this morning!  A genuine breakthrough, a significant advance in my technique.  Suddenly, I can play the C major Etude damn near note perfect and up to speed!  While I memorized this piece years ago, I still can't play it up to snuff.

Westney addresses the objection I frequently have against stopping at every daunting figure and working it out, which is that if we take the time to do this with every trouble spot we'll never have time to learn the piece.  

Well, no, that's exactly backwards!  When we take the time to work out the troubled spot, we get it right in the fastest and most efficient way possible, and we truly learn the damned thing!  We master it, we own it, and it happens so much faster than it otherwise would.  In fact, without attending to the trouble spots in this fashion, we never actually master a difficult piece of music.  

I have half a dozen Chopin Etudes I've worked on for years now without ever actually getting any of them truly up to snuff!  Now I've damn near got one, Opus 10 Number 1 in C, and it's one of the hardest of the lot.  Just one, but I almost have it.  

Suddenly I can see my way clear through to mastering this exalted work!

This is thrilling stuff!  I am dizzy with delight! 

E  P  N 

2012.0301