Shoot like an Air Marshal
With all this talk of missing airliners in the news, I thought it may be worthwhile to take a look at our country’s own Federal Air Marshal Service from who they are to what they do to what they carry and how they use it.
The US Federal Aviation Administration began its “Sky Marshal” program during the Kennedy administration in 1962, which were a lonely group of just 18 FAA Inspectors who were plainclothes and armed with small frame .38 caliber revolvers. These men, trained by the Border Patrol, were the first undercover agents salted away aboard civilian aircraft. Posing as ordinary passengers as their cover, they divided their time between watching for hijackers and reading the paper. These old Sky Marshals made a brief appearance in the 1983 film, Twilight Zone: the movie, where a young John Lithgow grabs the sleeping agent’s S&W Model 60 snub.
By 1985, with international terrorism replacing DB Cooper as the major cause of heartburn to airlines, the Sky Marshals were expanded to a whopping 50-ish agents and they were given more training and better arms…
Read the rest in my column at Firearms Talk.com