It looks likely American lawmakers will soon agree airline pilots (as do all of us with a Blue Passport) have an inalienable Second Amendment Right To Bear Arms. Or in this particular case, pilots have a Right To Protect Our Sorry Arses. Support is apparently overwhelming. The public and the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) with strong support of air service staff are solidly behind it. There’s hardly a discouraging word to be heard in the halls of the Senate… with the exception of our old friend Senator Fritz “I’m For Sale” Hollings (D Disney) who is worried he’ll lose the terrorist vote if they all get shot before the next election.
Hollings and his friends will no doubt be wheeling out all the hackneyed arguments agin it. They’ll regale us with visions of pilots with the aim of an Imperial Storm Trooper who failed his Rifle Qual. Or like a posse from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, blowing holes through passengers, windows and wings while missing the hijacker standing Jedi-like six feet away. And of course dozens of passengers strained out of the airplane through centimetre holes while the rest balloon up and die in “Outpost” airlock-like technicolour gore.
But it ain’t that way in real life.
Many pilots are ex-military pilots who are well at ease with firearms and are just as likely to drop the sucker on the first shot as not. And as to the holes in the fuselage… that brings me to a story.
I was sitting in a hotel bar in Denver (doubt anyone is surprised at the story so far) late one night a couple weeks ago. It was a fairly quiet night. The three of us around the small round table were getting served rather quickly. But this was not your ordinary group watching sports and women in a hotel bar. The scene would not have been out of place in a movie about the making of the first A-Bomb. The table top was filled with napkins covered in arcane “back of the envelope” calculations made by a physicist friend who actually did work with Dr Teller at one time.
Among the many problems solved amidst the constant stream of engineering lubricant (Sam Adams is a nice beer for a Libertarian) were: “Will normal pots and pans survive launch in a gas gun at 3000 Gravities?”… and “What is the bleed down time for a Boeing 747 with a bullet hole in it?”
The answer to that question was: a good fraction of an entire day. And that was making the assumption the cabin pressurization was static. Which it isn’t, so basically a couple bullet holes in the frame won’t even make the system blink.
What we have here folks is your basic non-problem.
Erratum: As one reader pointed out, the movie name was Outland, not Outpost!
