Trust is not transitive

by billso on Sunday, 30 March 2008

When the FAA allowed air­line pilots to carry guns, sup­port­ers claimed that armed pilots could be trusted. After all, pilots are respon­si­ble for fly­ing mul­ti­mil­lion dol­lar jets filled with peo­ple, right?

As Peter Bid­dle (via Boing­Bo­ing) points out, this logic is flawed because trust is not tran­si­tive. An air­line pilot can have thou­sands of hours logged in the cock­pit. Pilots receive only one week of train­ing with their .40 cal­iber semi­au­to­matic H&K USP sidearms. The two skills do not rein­force or relate to each other in any way. In fact, pilots may need sev­eral hun­dred hours expe­ri­ence with a weapon to develop safety skills that are as reli­able as their fly­ing skills.

So when a USAir­ways pilot blows a hole through his cock­pit while try­ing to stow his hand­gun before land­ing his plane, as this AP story describes, no one should be surprised:

The pis­tol dis­charged shortly before noon Sat­ur­day aboard Flight 1536 from Den­ver to Char­lotte, as the Air­bus A319 was at about 8,000 feet and about 10 min­utes from landing.

Here are some exam­ples I just made up on my own. feel free to add your own as a comment!

  • No sen­si­ble per­son would trust an astro­naut to per­form heart surgery, unless that astro­naut were also an expe­ri­ence heart surgeon.
  • Stunt per­form­ers may be brave, but that doesn’t make them great parents.
  • Pro­fes­sors may be mas­ters in their field, but that doesn’t mean they can use a com­puter. I still hear about pro­fes­sors who can­not answer their own e-mail!
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Tagged as: airlines, authority, Federal, reliability, security, teaching, trust

  • dpeters1

    Peo­ple thought that giv­ing guns to pilots was a good idea security-wise, and they (quite incor­rectly) believed that pilots would receive the train­ing nec­es­sary to han­dle these guns. Per­son­ally, I never thought that being able to fly a plane for a job made pilots more capa­ble with han­dling firearms. What I did think was that any sort of major pol­icy like this would be backed with decent training.

    Unfor­tu­nately, it appears as though this “pilots with guns” idea is just to make peo­ple feel safer. If it were a real secu­rity fea­ture, pilots would have real train­ing and prob­a­bly have to log a manda­tory amount of time at shoot­ing ranges every so often.

    To make things even worse, I won­der how this event fares sta­tis­ti­cally. What are the rates of acci­den­tal weapons dis­charge among cops? Sol­diers? It is entirely con­ceiv­able to me that given thou­sands of pilots with guns, it was only a mat­ter of time before some­thing like this happened.

  • http://billso.com billso

    Very good com­ment. Should be easy to find acci­den­tal weapons dis­charge rates online… any­one wanna take up the hunt?

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