Federal Flight Deck Officer Program

A few years ago a pilot out of somewhere in California made quite a stir when he YouTubed the fact he as to go through the abuse of TSA morons but the crew that services the plan (i.e. fills the drinks, cleans it up, etc) just has to scan in at an unmanned gate. One of the points he made was he was the only man authorized to be armed on the plane (other than Federal Air Marshals). He also made the simple point if he was compromised it was "game over", the flight was doomed. Not that logic, common sense or intelligence has ever guided this process.

Last week I was at Heritage.org and found this interesting article on how the B Hussein Obama regime wanted to cut back on the Federal Flight Deck Program. Seeing it is mostly funded by the airlines as opposed to the taxpayers kinda makes since. He is saying "I want your toys, if I can't have them you can take them and leave!"

In all seriousness this was an interesting read. I've cut out some of the background material (still recommend the full article) and here is some of the more interesting stuff on the hostility of the TSA on armed pilots.

Federal Flight Deck Officer program: Planned Disarming a Mistake

...A Pattern of Institutional Hostility

They (the TSA) refused to accept a database we handed to them with 10,000 volunteer pilots on a CD. That could have gotten them started contacting pilots and putting them in the program right away, but they refused to accept it. They also refused to accept a program outline that we developed in concert with the FBI, some agents with the FBI that had designed a cockpit protection program. They completely ignored the fact we had initiated a Professional Standards program for the pilots who would eventually be armed.

They were also hostile to the design of the program itself, and they designed it to discourage participation. They created excessive background checks that were redundant, checks that we had already endured just to become an airline pilot—checks with regard to security, financial, and criminal background checks.

The initial weapon choice was inadequate. we called it the Barney Fife pistol because it was a six-shot revolver. We produced a video that showed them it was inadequate for the job.

We had an enactment of terrorist actors on video that attacked the cockpit, and we were not able to handle them with either the six-shooter or the tasers that they asked us to use. Then we ended up with a more appropriate weapon.

Also, the carriage procedures that they designed were illogical and unsafe. They required us to transport the weapon except when in the cockpit where we could carry it—the difference being that carrying is on-person; transport is in some sort of bag or some other carriage method. No other law enforcement agencies in the world transport their weapons in that fashion.

Conclusion

The Administration’s institutional hostility toward the program continues to this day, as we can see from the Administration’s budget submission for FY 2013. They want to kill the program by cutting the funding in half when the funding should be increased so that we can get more pilots into the program.

We knew when we set out to design this program that we would have to spend the rest of our careers trying to protect it. I’ve been retired for seven years now, and here I am again.

—Lieutenant Colonel Al Aitken (USMC, Ret.), a retired commercial airline pilot and former U.S. Marine Corps test pilot, is Director of the Airline Security Consulting Group.

Not that a pilot or Marine officer would know anything about securing an airline flight. No, we need guys who were last week spotted at the park in a 20 year old van looking at children to pat down old ladies and kids for that.

But there was some good news on this front.

House kills Obama proposal to slash spending on armed airline pilot program

Who says Barack Obama isn’t working to reduce government spending as promised? Why, in March he proposed reducing funding by half for the Federal Flight Deck Officer Program. This is a program that permits commercial airline pilots to keep firearms in the cockpit and to use lethal force to defend against air piracy. The measure would have saved taxpayers $12.5 million, which doesn’t amount to much, but the president also recommended trimming the Federal Air Marshal Service by $36.5 million.

Yesterday, Obama’s proposed cuts were rejected by the House of Representatives, according to a press release from Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John L. Mica (R-Fla.). The provision to override the cuts was included in the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act (H.R. 5855), approved last night. Of the Obama cuts, Mica said:

Having armed pilots in the cockpit is an important layer of defense against terrorism, especially given the endless examples of the massive TSA bureaucracy’s other failures. It would be foolish to gut security programs that actually work, like the Federal Flight Deck Officer Program, in which our airline pilots bear much of the training costs and help ensure the cockpit is defended.

Remember, B Hussein Obama will not rest until every passenger is safe in the air....

Hopefully this survives the budget process and then after (Please God please!) Obama is sent back to Chicago we can expand it. Again, if the pilot is compromised the flight and it's passengers are doomed and no amount of TSA morons making handicapped people in wheelchairs strip will stop that. Next if we can delete TSA from the budget we can start making some real progress on bringing the airlines back.