January 08, 2004, 8:35 a.m.
Thank Your FAMs
Commercial travel is getting safer, by long shots.

It all went Orange on December 21, and ever since there has been a steady flow of disruptions to commercial air travel. Flights to the United States from Mexico City, Paris, and London are being cancelled and even turned around because of specific information about planned hijackings. One arriving flight was held on a Dulles runway for almost three hours while security officers searched and questioned passengers. There seems to be no end to the bad news. But fortunately for us, and our economy, the skies are safe — despite what terrorists may think.

The American economy depends upon air commerce, and if the bad guys pull off another 9/11, they could ground commercial aviation for many months and send the Dow Jones below 7,000. Our intel guys have concluded — after sifting through a lot of specific information, including the results of interrogation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay — that terrorists remain convinced that airliners are still the most powerful weapon readily available to them. They apparently think that the protective measures we have taken — especially the armed undercover federal air marshals — are all show and no go because the marshals won't shoot while the aircraft is in flight, for fear that a stray bullet would cause catastrophic decompression of the aircraft. The enemy is wrong for two reasons: First, our guys know you can shoot a whole bunch of holes though the skin of an airliner without anything really bad happening; and second — according to Tom Quinn, director of the Federal Air Marshal Service — his people won't hesitate to shoot if they have to.

You've seen the movies. Someone shoots one hole through the ceiling of the aircraft, and suddenly there's wind tearing through the passenger compartment, people being sucked out windows, the aircraft falling, out of control. But it doesn't work that way. My pal Chuck Nash is a retired navy captain, a highly experienced fly-guy, and an engineer. (He's also a Fox News military analyst.) He explained why the bad guys have it wrong from an engineering standpoint: "Commercial aircraft pressurization systems are very, very, robust, so a bullet...or even several bullets...puncturing the aircraft's pressurized hull will not affect things one bit unless they happen to hit a hydraulic line or critical component of the flight controls on the way out...and the potential for that is very remote."

And even if a bomb rips a big chunk of the airplane off, you'll still likely live to fly again another day. Chuck reminded me of a couple of incidents that prove the point. In 1988, a huge chunk of the fuselage roof ripped off of an Aloha Airlines 737 at an altitude of 24,000 feet. In another incident, a flight out of Hawaii had a pressurized cargo door blow off at high altitude. Both aircraft depressurized catastrophically, and both landed safely minus a few people who were blown out because they weren't wearing seat belts when the accidents occurred. Some larger aircraft, such as the DC-10 and MD-11, have pressure-relief valves two or three inches in diameter that can be left wide open without the aircraft depressurizing at all. So if you want to avoid an unwanted Peter Pan imitation, wear your seat belt. If someone shoots a lot of holes in the aircraft, or blows up his Reeboks, you may be in for a rough and scary ride, but the odds are very much in favor of you walking away from the landing under your own power. The people most at risk will be those without seat belts: the terrorists, and the Federal Air Marshals whose job it is to stop them.

In my conversation with Tom Quinn, he impressed me as a calm, professional, and very tough guy. He spent 20 years in the Secret Service and a dozen years running an international security company before taking over the FAMs. His business now is the Three D's: detecting, deterring, and defeating terrorist attacks against U.S. commercial aircraft.

The FAMs go through a lot of training before they take that lousy middle seat next to your fat uncle. For starters, there's the ordinary stuff they have to know to be federal law-enforcement officers: the law, search and seizure, shooting proficiency, and the rest. Then there's the extraordinary: intelligence gathering and sharing, and the tactical use of firearms on airliners.

Quinn told me that the FAMs will protect the passengers and crew of an aircraft "at all costs." Ok, so what does that mean? "When you consider the world the FAMs live in...30,000 feet, 200 passengers on board, felony in progress, they can't back out," Quinn said. So, if necessary, they will shoot? "Absolutely...a significant part of their training is in the deployment of their sidearm in that enclosed cabin of an aircraft."

The aisle of an aircraft is roughly 23 inches wide. On a Boeing 747, the flight deck and first-class cabin are about 41 feet long. That's about twice the normal seven-meter distance that the SEALs and the rest of the spec-ops guys train with pistols. In Quinn's words, the FAMs have to be "able to deliver very accurate fire at very specific targets at extended distances along an aircraft." You have to spend a lot of time on the tactical firing range to be able to do that. This is more than just punching holes in paper: There are moving targets, and shooters draw and fire while turning, twisting, and diving. I've done it, and there's nothing easy about it. Quinn is confident his people have the skill levels they need to do it for real.

The FAMs get it, in at least two ways. Yes, they will shoot if they have to, but long before it gets that bad, they are sharing intelligence with other federal agencies on a daily, hourly, and even minute-by-minute basis to stop the terrorist before he can strike. Every FAM has a wireless e-mail device that allows him to send and receive information about specific threats anywhere, anytime. If a FAM sees a suspicious person at an airport one day, this means that a FAM in the same airport later that day or a week later will have the information about that person reported by the first marshal. The FAMs are doing tactical intelligence gathering and sharing better than any law-enforcement agency I know of. And that means more detection and interdiction, lessening the need for gunfights at 30,000 feet.

I asked Tom what message he'd pass along to the bad guys, baiting him for a growly, macho message. He didn't take the bait. Again, the calm professional: "My own style is to make it clear to my own people that there's no limit — other than their making certain that it is a deadly, lethal situation — for them to use deadly force."

We've been at high alert levels off and on for months. Is the current demand stretching the FAM force too thin? Quinn is managing his people and supplementing them by drawing on other Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as a sort of reserve force. "We are in the midst of training and deploying ICE agents as air marshals in these heightened alerts so that we don't burn out FAMs," he said.

There are more FAMs deployed on more flights now than at any time in history. Quinn told me, "The Federal Air Marshal Service today flies more missions in one month than in the cumulative history of the Service...Americans should have confidence that the Federal Air Marshals are there 24/7 flying missions to detect, deter and defeat the terrorist."

Travel by air whenever you please and wear your seat belt. The skies will never be totally safe, but we're a damned sight safer now than we were on 9/11 thanks, in large part, to Tom Quinn and the FAMs.

— NRO Contributor Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and is now an MSNBC military analyst.

*   *   *

YOU’RE NOT A SUBSCRIBER TO NATIONAL REVIEW? Sign up right now! It’s easy: Subscribe to National Review here, or to the digital version of the magazine here. You can even order a subscription as a gift: print or digital!