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Pilots' group decries missile deployment
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Pilots' group decries missile deployment
Says better to arm captains than shoot down commercial jets
Posted: September 13, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty
c 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
The head of an airline pilots' organization pressing for legislation to allow guns in the cockpits of commercial airliners has criticized the Bush administration's decision to deploy air-defense missiles and fighters over Washington, D.C., during the Sept. 11 commemoration - ready to shoot down any passenger jets that were hijacked.
"On the one-year anniversary of the (9-11) attacks, the U.S. government aimed surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at the skies" over the nation's capital "and launched armed fighters to patrol the skies over our largest cities," said Capt. Tracy Price, chairman of the Airline Pilots' Security Alliance. "The decision to 'defend' our citizens in this manner speaks volumes about the administration's confidence in their progress toward improving airline security after a full year's effort."
APSA and other groups, including some pilots' unions, have said that arming pilots against potential terrorist hijackers is a quicker, cheaper and more efficient way to ensure air safety.
Administration officials have said they want pilots flying the aircraft and are fearful that an errant shot inside a crowded jetliner could lead to injury or death of innocent passengers.
But Price and others also say even if a passenger is injured or killed in an exchange with terrorists - unlikely with the right training and ammunition, experts say - better to risk a few passengers rather than everyone aboard, who would assuredly be killed if a plane were to be shot down by a fighter jet or surface-launched air-defense missile.
"The administration policy to destroy a hijacked airliner while denying the pilots firearms with which to defend the airliner needs a closer look," Price said. "Missiles can only be used to destroy an airliner that has been hijacked by terrorists, and all on board will most certainly die.
"The concept of arming pilots with firearms to prevent or stop a hijacking is viewed by some as an extreme and intrusive measure, but we think they've got it exactly backwards," he continued. "The policy of sacrificing a civilian airliner with innocent Americans on board to keep terrorists from using it as a weapon - while at the same time refusing to allow the pilots an opportunity to offer a last resort, final line of defense - is the extremist view that should be ridiculed and dismissed."
Pentagon officials announced Tuesday that the deployment of mobile Avenger SAM units mounted atop military Humvees, along with individual units armed with hand-held Stinger missiles, was incorporated as part of an existing exercise known as "Clear Skies II."
Initially, these troops were not armed, but they were given live weapons after Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge announced Sept. 10 that they had increased the nation's terrorist threat level from "yellow," or "elevated," to "orange" - the next to highest warning level.
"The decision to change the threat level is a result of the fusion ... of all intelligence available through our own means and that other nations have provided," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday.
"Clear Skies II" runs through Sept 14, officials said. It is designed to test an air-ground, multi-layered air-defense system. It was combined into the Pentagon's ongoing "Operation Noble Eagle," the military's homeland defense operation.
But Price said despite the stepped-up military measures, the best solution was still to allow pilots to protect their planes with guns.
"Terrorists want to strike fear into our hearts by attacking us in unthinkable ways," he said. "They expect to die in the process. It is hard to imagine a more enticing scenario to a terrorist group than the prospect of forcing the United States to unceremoniously kill its own innocent citizens."
Alternately, he reasoned, "it would be nearly impossible to gain control of an airliner with armed pilots locked behind a reinforced cockpit door."
Other airline industry groups, such as flight attendants' unions, as well as most airlines, oppose arming pilots. Flight crew personnel oppose it because they say they will be left alone - and unarmed - in the cabin to deal with terrorists.
But Price, himself a commercial pilot, said arming the flight deck would serve as the best deterrent to future hijackings.
"Arming pilots with firearms promises deterrence and makes the successful execution of the hijacking nearly impossible," he said.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28932
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Says better to arm captains than shoot down commercial jets
Posted: September 13, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty
c 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
The head of an airline pilots' organization pressing for legislation to allow guns in the cockpits of commercial airliners has criticized the Bush administration's decision to deploy air-defense missiles and fighters over Washington, D.C., during the Sept. 11 commemoration - ready to shoot down any passenger jets that were hijacked.
"On the one-year anniversary of the (9-11) attacks, the U.S. government aimed surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at the skies" over the nation's capital "and launched armed fighters to patrol the skies over our largest cities," said Capt. Tracy Price, chairman of the Airline Pilots' Security Alliance. "The decision to 'defend' our citizens in this manner speaks volumes about the administration's confidence in their progress toward improving airline security after a full year's effort."
APSA and other groups, including some pilots' unions, have said that arming pilots against potential terrorist hijackers is a quicker, cheaper and more efficient way to ensure air safety.
Administration officials have said they want pilots flying the aircraft and are fearful that an errant shot inside a crowded jetliner could lead to injury or death of innocent passengers.
But Price and others also say even if a passenger is injured or killed in an exchange with terrorists - unlikely with the right training and ammunition, experts say - better to risk a few passengers rather than everyone aboard, who would assuredly be killed if a plane were to be shot down by a fighter jet or surface-launched air-defense missile.
"The administration policy to destroy a hijacked airliner while denying the pilots firearms with which to defend the airliner needs a closer look," Price said. "Missiles can only be used to destroy an airliner that has been hijacked by terrorists, and all on board will most certainly die.
"The concept of arming pilots with firearms to prevent or stop a hijacking is viewed by some as an extreme and intrusive measure, but we think they've got it exactly backwards," he continued. "The policy of sacrificing a civilian airliner with innocent Americans on board to keep terrorists from using it as a weapon - while at the same time refusing to allow the pilots an opportunity to offer a last resort, final line of defense - is the extremist view that should be ridiculed and dismissed."
Pentagon officials announced Tuesday that the deployment of mobile Avenger SAM units mounted atop military Humvees, along with individual units armed with hand-held Stinger missiles, was incorporated as part of an existing exercise known as "Clear Skies II."
Initially, these troops were not armed, but they were given live weapons after Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge announced Sept. 10 that they had increased the nation's terrorist threat level from "yellow," or "elevated," to "orange" - the next to highest warning level.
"The decision to change the threat level is a result of the fusion ... of all intelligence available through our own means and that other nations have provided," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday.
"Clear Skies II" runs through Sept 14, officials said. It is designed to test an air-ground, multi-layered air-defense system. It was combined into the Pentagon's ongoing "Operation Noble Eagle," the military's homeland defense operation.
But Price said despite the stepped-up military measures, the best solution was still to allow pilots to protect their planes with guns.
"Terrorists want to strike fear into our hearts by attacking us in unthinkable ways," he said. "They expect to die in the process. It is hard to imagine a more enticing scenario to a terrorist group than the prospect of forcing the United States to unceremoniously kill its own innocent citizens."
Alternately, he reasoned, "it would be nearly impossible to gain control of an airliner with armed pilots locked behind a reinforced cockpit door."
Other airline industry groups, such as flight attendants' unions, as well as most airlines, oppose arming pilots. Flight crew personnel oppose it because they say they will be left alone - and unarmed - in the cabin to deal with terrorists.
But Price, himself a commercial pilot, said arming the flight deck would serve as the best deterrent to future hijackings.
"Arming pilots with firearms promises deterrence and makes the successful execution of the hijacking nearly impossible," he said.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28932
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Comments
Flying has never been my favorite activity, and it's gotten a lot harder over the last year. I fly, on average, a couple of times a month. Barely a week after the September 11 attacks, I was back in an airplane flying across the country, and I haven't avoided taking a single flight since. But I'm always nervous the moment I step foot in the airport. For a while after the attacks, when airport security seemed intense, at least in the Washington, D.C., area, I felt a little better. All those fresh, young National Guardsmen and women with assault rifles patrolling the airport gave me some sense of safety. But they're mostly gone now, replaced by state police whose guns are a lot smaller and whose middle-aged girths give me less confidence that they could deter a group of tough young terrorists like those who killed 3,000 Americans last fall.
Apparently, I'm not alone in these feelings. Last week, the U.S. Senate voted 87 to 6 to allow pilots to carry guns in the cockpit, a stunning political turnabout made possible because of a sea change in public opinion. The flying public wants to feel safe again, and guns -- in the right hands -- will make them feel safer. And women, more than men, want pilots armed; at least that's the result of a poll taken by the Winston Group for the Allied Pilots Association.
The poll of 800 randomly selected registered voters across the nation showed 75 percent favored arming pilots, but slightly more women (76 percent compared with 73 percent of men) wanted guns in the cockpit. Married women with children were the most supportive of all, with 78 percent voicing approval.
These figures no doubt explain why liberal California Sen. Barbara Boxer helped lead the charge for arming pilots. Boxer has always been an implacable foe of guns. She was one of the congressional leaders of the Million Mom March for gun control legislation in 2000 and has been an outspoken critic of the right for private citizens to bear arms. Yet, last week, she was one of the most impassioned proponents for arming one group of private citizens -- pilots.
But if women and even liberal Democrats are eager to give guns to pilots, the Bush administration is still dragging its feet. Reluctantly, the administration has now said it could support a test program to arm a small number of pilots on a trial basis. But overall, the administration has been surprisingly slow to take measures to improve public confidence in airline safety.
Security checks have become almost a joke. Lines are long and tempers short, but the sight of 70-year-old women being patted down at the baggage screening area gives no one a sense that screeners are likely to intercept potential hijackers. This week, when I flew from Dulles airport in Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, I waited several extra minutes while an obviously confused elderly man had to be hand-searched because he'd forgotten to take his keys out of his pocket and was struggling to get his shoes off so they could be run through the metal detector.
On another recent trip, I watched a suspiciously agitated Middle Eastern man twice try to sneak through the crew screening area without proper identification. Yet only when I drew a nearby guard's attention to the man was he stopped for the same treatment I routinely receive on my many trips -- frisked, bags hand-searched, wands swept over his body. The secretary of transportation's politically correct pledge that there will be no ethnic profiling of airline passengers has led to ridiculous and potentially dangerous situations. Those from the same demographic group as the hijackers are ignored while little old ladies are subjected to humiliating searches.
The Winston Group poll showed that growing numbers of Americans have decided to forgo airline travel altogether. Some 29 percent of those polled say they won't fly, with nearly a third of women saying they won't get on a plane. With the airline industry one of the most fragile components of our still struggling economy, the president and his administration must do something to restore travelers' confidence. A good first step would be for the Bush administration to enthusiastically endorse a program to arm pilots on a voluntary basis.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/lindachavez/lc20020911.shtml
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878