Air travel can be made safer

Opinion: February 16, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By MICHAEL SMERCONISH

President Obama has the chance to give new meaning to the phrase “carry-on” as it applies to air travel. Here’s hoping he pulls the trigger.

The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) is the country’s largest nonprofit group that exclusively represents federal law enforcement officers. Its 26,000 members work for an alphabet soup of national-security entities: the FBI, DEA, and FEMA, for example. Not to mention Homeland Security agencies like Border Patrol, Secret Service, and the Transportation Security Administration.

The FLEOA has just asked the president to allow all appropriately certified federal, state, and local officers to take guns aboard domestic flights. Currently, those officers are authorized by law to carry wherever they are in the country. But the overwhelming majority cannot take a gun onto a plane unless they have department approval — and only when the travel is work-related. The FLEOA wants that allowance expanded to include all officers — active or retired, federal or local, on or off duty — and all types of travel.

In other words, this request could empower countless law enforcement workers to pack heat on domestic flights as an added line of defense against terrorists.

Spare me predictions of Wild West-style shoot-outs that would break out before the pilot turns off the “fasten seat belt” sign. Not just anybody would be able to take a gun onto a plane. Those authorized to do so would be obligated to meet standards set forth by the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act of 2004, including federal air marshal training and registration, medical certification, and up-to-date firearms qualifications. They would have to submit to quarterly or semiannual firearms tests as well as in-flight tactical and awareness training.

These officers are clearly capable of becoming another in-flight deterrent in case of emergency. Active and retired officers, the FLEOA correctly notes, have garnered “invaluable” experience and training in firearms use. Most significant in my mind are their skills “in surveillance techniques to identify potential criminals or terrorists” that could be put to use in the air.

The need for that expertise is acute. A CBS News report last week indicated that an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 federal air marshals are expected to cover the approximately 27,000 domestic and international flights in the air each day.

Not surprisingly, there was no such figure present on the Detroit-bound flight that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to bomb in December. Nor is there a marshal presence on the overwhelming majority of flights entering and leaving the United States each day. Post-Christmas, many federal air marshals — who carry firearms on planes — were shifted from domestic flights to international flights, further eroding the already scant coverage.

Air marshals

The Air Transport Association, a trade organization of the country’s largest airlines, said in an e-mailed statement that it “believes commercial airline cabin security is best handled through the Federal Air Marshal program.” FLEOA, on the other hand, sees a void that can be easily and logically plugged — at no cost to the government. As FLEOA President Jon Adler told me during an interview, “To have 800,000-plus — actually closer to a million, including honorably retired officers — sitting on the bench, if you will, not being called into play to increase air travel safety, is mind-boggling.”

Arthur Wolk, a Philadelphia lawyer, pilot, and aviation expert sees it differently. “The only way to prevent terrorism in aviation is to prevent the terrorists from getting to the airport,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “That means keeping them out of the country, profiling, no-fly lists that are accurate and up to date, immigration reform, and careful surveillance of fifth columns now being nurtured in this country.”

He makes sense, but that is not happening.

Over the past decade, it has fallen to the passengers themselves to foil attacks on planes. The Christmas Day near miss was only the latest example.

On 9/11, the heroic passengers and crew aboard United Flight 93 forced their attackers to ground the plane 20 minutes short of its intended target in Washington. It’s not hard to envision a different outcome for that flight (or the others hijacked that morning) had an officer with a concealed weapon been onboard. The same can be said for American Airlines Flight 63, where attendants and passengers subdued shoe bomber Richard Reid as he tried to ignite the explosives hidden at his feet.

Airport security measures won’t always prevent terrorists from boarding airplanes with weapons. And security is even less stringent at train stations and other travel hubs.

U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., got it right when he recently said: “If we think we’re going to stop the terrorists from getting on planes and trains by technology, we are dead wrong, and I don’t want us to be dead.” He continued: “We need to understand that this is a human intervention situation and that we must spend more time at putting boots on the ground and people behind the lines who understand what’s going on, who can know what the enemy is all about.”

Airline passengers are, like it or not, the last line of “human intervention” between terrorists and their targets. Why not empower them by allowing active and retired law enforcement officers to stow a new kind of carry-on?

President Obama has the chance to give new meaning to the phrase “carry-on” as it applies to air travel. Here’s hoping he pulls the trigger.

The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA), the country’s largest nonprofit group that exclusively represents federal law enforcement officers, has just asked the president to allow all appropriately certified federal, state, and local officers to take guns aboard domestic flights.

This request could empower countless law enforcement workers to pack heat on domestic flights as an added line of defense against terrorists.

X Michael Smerconish writes a weekly column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.