No guns on planes

When, at the insistence of the US Department of Homeland Security, the first armed ‘sky marshals’ take to British transatlantic flights, it is to be hoped that the in-flight movie won’t be Goldfinger. For anyone who has managed to avoid seeing any of the 40 years’ worth of repeat screenings, the Bond film concludes with the sight of Goldfinger’s portly frame being sucked through a plane window shattered in a gunfight with 007.

It doesn’t take any great knowledge of aircraft pressurisation systems to realise that guns and planes do not mix. The pilots’ union, Balpa, has come to the same conclusion. Even former BOAC pilot Norman Tebbit, who supports the case for sky marshals elsewhere in these pages, does so with grave reservations. Never mind assurances that the low-velocity bullets to be used should not pierce an airframe; it will be all but impossible for a sky marshal to shoot a terrorist within the confined space of a jet without also killing or injuring other passengers.

If a gunfight in business class were the only way to avert another atrocity of the nature of 11 September, the death of the odd innocent passenger would be a risk worth taking. But there is no guarantee that sky marshals would have prevented 11 September; on the contrary, the terrorists might have found their task made easier had they been able to infiltrate the newly formed US Federal Air Marshall Service and board the planes with guns. The service found itself having to curtail its recruitment and training procedures in order to create new sky marshals at the rate of 800 a month; what chance that among them lie one or two with Islamic fundamentalist sympathies? Even without ill intent, some of the American marshals have proved less than adept at their duties: shooting flight attendants in exercises and pulling guns on passengers who were merely drunk.