by Wendy Perrin

More light weekend reading (ha!): Security expert and firearms enthusiast Guy Martin is over at Conde Nast Traveler's new blog, The Daily Traveler, arguing that the blame for that US Airways cockpit incident last month is not the pilot's alone and scaring us all to death. Don't miss The Shootist at 8,000 Feet.

Photo: The Associated Press

By Guy Martin

Since my post re: last weekend's gunplay in the cockpit, the Associated Press released a photo of the damage. 

What's splendid about the US Airways pilot's explanation to police that he was stowing the gun as a bullet penetrated--and exited--the fuselage just below Flight 1536's portside cockpit window (according to the AP photographs of the bullet's entry and exit holes) is that he did not fire across anybody. That means that he was pointing it away from the other people in the cockpit. 

So until the other cockpit occupants give testimony, the gun bearer has demonstrated a modicum of gun control, and that's great. You point the gat away from where the people are, unless you want to shoot them.   

But two important gun-handling questions remain for the investigators. 

They are:
1) Why was this gun out during the flight? Asked another way, why does this firearm need to be stowed? No airborne gun bearer on civilian flights--including those of El Al--has their gun out during the flight, unless they intend to shoot somebody. 

2) In the process of stowing a handgun, it is not possible to chamber a round, cock the gun, and throw the safety off, unless you mean to do it. Ergo: These actions occurred at some point on this gun. When did they occur?

By Guy Martin

A gun is a gun is a gun. Any right weapon is built to fulfill its mechanical mission absolutely, no matter who handles it. Even the most well-meaning professional shooters, those to whom we loan our civic mandate to bear arms, are fallible. It's normal. We're the humans in the equation. The guns are the machines.   

Now comes last Saturday's dispatch that a US Airways pilot--a yet-unidentified person who was part of the Transportation Security Administration's mandated Federal Flight Deck Officer training program--succeeded in letting his handgun discharge as he piloted Flight 1536 from the left seat in the cockpit, en route from Denver to the US Air hub in Charlotte, North Carolina.   

Happy Easter, everybody! 

I mean that. Clearly, the bunny--or Jesus, take your pick--held some special resurrection mojo over the 129 passengers and flight personnel of Flight 1536. Because the firearms facts are inexorable: if you jostle the trigger mechanism of a modern .40-caliber Heckler and Koch semiautomatic with a shell in the chamber and the safety off--the .40 cal. H&K being one of the TSA-approved handguns for cockpit use--the gun will make no situational judgment before it fires. It will do what it's built to do.   

By Guy Martin

A few days ago, as we reached cruising altitude en route to a destination that I shan't reveal, aboard a major carrier I also won't identify, from a major American hub I'd really rather not name, the flight crew had just taken off the seat belt sign. I jumped up to grab a book. The book lay deep in my rucksack and took some grubbing around to extract. There was a mess of other stuff down in there--papers, batteries, tape recorder, notebooks. As we know, the first rule of carry-ons is no matter how allegedly convenient or well packed they are, whatever you want is by definition at the bottom. 

Still, when I yanked the book free, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that--like a snowplow--it was pushing a wave of objects before it: a notepad, a few pens and pencils . . . and my Swiss Army knife. I caught the knife as it popped into the air, stuffed it back in, zipped the rucksack, and sat down.   

Holy crap!

It could be worse. They could be at LaGuardia right now.
Photo: The Associated Press

By Guy Martin

I notice you're not taking a private jet for the holidays. Looooo-zer! Kidding. But the point is that this weekend's expected record 4.7 million turkey lovers moving their asses around in the air to overeat with the relatives is, well, a record. Best of luck getting that whole mother-in-law suckup weekend kicked off on time, dude!

We don't have a hotline to heaven, we can't control the weather, but we have compiled a CNT Passenger-Screening Akido Tip List (tm) to help you reduce the amount of time wasted at checkpoints.

Have a spotty record? The only London Bridge you'll ever see is this one in Lake Havasu, Arizona.
Photo: Aran Johnson

by Stephan Wilkinson

Disabuse yourself of any notion that those nice people who wrote the Magna Carta are any more concerned about personal freedoms and privacy than are U.S. border collies. Whether it's to show us that anything we can do they can do better or simply creeping authoritarianism, the British government is putting into effect a hugely expensive plan ($2.5 billion over the next ten years, the cost to be passed on to travelers) to collect a wide variety of data on every traveler daring to enter or leave those sceptered isles, whether by air, sea, or ground (the Chunnel).

How wide? Well, everything from name, rank, and serial number to your rap sheet, FBI file, automobile license plate and credit-card number. And who knows, probably your FaceBook page and that New Year's-party video your neighbor posted on YouTube. Up to 53 different pieces of information, which will be recorded when you buy a ticket to or from the UK. And the Brits will keep the information for as long as they please.

Got an outstanding traffic ticket or any other court fine? Go back home or pay it. You were once arrested for peeing beer in a dark parking lot and it got turned into a sex-offense charge? Don?t even bother to pack. Involved in a messy child-support case that hasn't been settled? Stay home. Somebody has a file on you because you were thrown out of a Bush rally? Go to France instead.

Oh wait, the French might do it too.

American air passengers' new best friend:
the Government Accountability Office.
Photo: Associated Press

By Guy Martin

A bracing lesson in why asymmetrical warfare (approximately David vs. Goliath, Attila vs. Rome) works so often to the disadvantage of the larger combatant arrived with a bang two days ago in the form of the Government Accountability Office's succinct and terrifying 11-page report on the effectiveness of the Transport Security Administration's suicide-bomb-screening at airports. Just in time for next week's national Thanksgiving air travel spike, we might add. Get thee into the air to see the relatives, America! But before boarding the plane, do make sure to hang a left at the sports bar and pound five or six stiff drinks. Whether you drink or not.

Because, according to the GAO, our bomb screening sucks. Furthermore: It really sucks.

Conde Nast Traveler's Barbara Peterson catches a break.
Photo: Marc Asnin, Conde Nast Traveler

by Wendy Perrin

Those of you planning to travel next week can't be too happy about the recent report detailing how government investigators were able to successfully smuggle liquid explosives and detonators past airport security. 

While our suggested link of the day may not make you feel better, it should be able to shed some light on the realities facing the overworked members of the Transportation Security Administration--America's last line of defense. 

From September to October of 2006 our very own aviation correspondent Barbara S. Peterson worked undercover at the TSA as an airport screener-in-training. Her report of the experience, which first appeared in the March 2007 issue of Conde Nast Traveler, is now online.

Read it: Inside Job: My Life as an Airport Screener.

Note from Wendy: Please join me in welcoming Guy Martin to the blog. Guy is a senior correspondent here at Conde Nast Traveler, juggling his investigative work into airport security and anti-terror technology with the occasional ode to various Central European cities. Guy, take it away . . .

by Guy Martin

In one sense, travel is about preventing stuff from coming undone. I travel with ten feet of light-gauge (7.5 mm) rope in, and a carabiner on, my rucksack, and have done since I took off for college in Europe about a billion years ago.

The system is useful for getting your kit off the ground, or lashing it to the top of a truck, or just plain old making it difficult to steal on a night train to nowhere. Right now I'm rocking a bigass Omega CE 0082 Screwgate "locking" carabiner--so named for its serrated locking nut that screws down over the spring-loaded gate. It costs about 13 bucks. It's a replacement.

It's a replacement because I was sporting its predecessor through a routine plane change in Charles de Gaulle when a rock-jawed security dick unclicked it from the top of my rucksack and tossed it into the bin with all the confiscated nail scissors and Swiss Army knives.