Trust is not transitive

Posted Sunday, 30 March 2008, 02:13 HST @425

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!

Tags: airlines, authority, Federal, reliability, security, teaching, trust

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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.