Why not leave the defense of the airplane to the Federal Air Marshals (FAM’s)?
The existence of the FAM program is a clear acknowledgement that security screening alone can not be relied upon to keep terrorists with weapons off of airliners and the fact that FAM’s carry firearms is evidence that a firearm is the proper weapon for defending against the terrorist threat. FAM’s are an important layer in the multi-layered defense system that APSA advocates, but there are weaknesses to this layer that must be confronted: – The FAM program is extremely expensive. The 10,000 FAM’s planned by the TSA will cost over a billion dollars. – 10,000 FAM’s will only be able to protect less than 10% of the flights. Your flight will rarely have a FAM on board, but your flight will always have at least two pilots on board. It would take over 100,000 FAM’s to protect each commercial flight and the cost would be astronomical. – Currently, nine months after the September 11th attacks, there are less than 1,000 FAM’s and they are protecting less than 1% of the flights. – The FAM progra
