Retired US Air Marshal Allen Robinson spent 10 years zig-zagging across the world protecting airline passengers from terrorists. Here, the 44-year-old former Marine marksman describes to The Post’s Michael Gartland chronic security lapses, poor training and declining standards at the Federal Air Marshal Service, despite its annual budget of more than $800 million. In fact, he claims, the agency makes our skies less friendly, even dangerous.
You’ve got jet lag all of the time. You’re on a plane, and you just can’t stay awake. You drink coffee until you’re sick.
Even if you had the day off before, you’re hanging out with your wife and family, you’re not sleeping that much. So you’re exhausted when you start.
You need to be well-rested and vigilant all the time. I’m a good shot. I can jump on a seat and shoot the target every time, but if I had to do it exhausted — with bad guys and human shields thrown in — it’s definitely not a good idea.
The condition we were in — most of the time the passengers would probably be safer if we weren’t on the plane. I was never able to feel alert like I’d feel alert if I were on a normal sleep schedule.
Sometimes you work in groups or pairs. By the end of the flight, you knew how exhausted the other guy was. My partners could barely stay awake.
Air marshals fly a lot more than pilots and flight attendants, but those airline employees are limited by law to a certain number of hours of work per day and per quarter. A pilot can’t fly more than 500 hours in a three-month period. A normal week in the air for me was between 50 and 60 hours, or about 700 hours every three months.
The regulations are written that way to keep pilots healthy and passengers safe. Air marshals aren’t regulated that way. As far as flight hours go, it’s whatever the mission requires. It’s more like the attitude the military has — you can sleep when you die.
I joined the Air Marshals after September 11th. Right before I joined, I talked with an agent out of the Atlantic City field office, one of the 33 field agents who were doing it before 9/11 — one of the “Old 33,” as they’re known.
He told me I’d be shooting 1,000 to 3,000 practice rounds a month. He told me we’d be trained by Delta Force operators and SEALs. It was an absolute fallacy.
Most of the time the passengers would probably be safer if we weren’t on the plane
- Allen Robinson, Retired US Air Marshal
He told me you’re going to have to pass a fitness test at regular intervals to be cleared to work. But you didn’t have to pass it. You didn’t even have to do well. You just had to take it — it was a “participation standard.”
It’s a minute’s worth of pull-ups, then push-ups, then sit-ups, and then a mile-and-a-half run. Everyone passes. I’ve seen guys walk around the track. They think it’s stupid.
I flew with guys who weighed over 300 pounds. They were eat-McDonald’s-every-day 300 pounds, not big-boned but in-shape guys. We had guys who needed seat-belt extensions. They could cram themselves into the seats, but they couldn’t jump up real quickly if they had to. That’s not the guy you want to be with in a fight in a confined space.
The reality is it’s difficult for the bad guys to get firearms on the airplane, so their tactics dictate that they’ll inundate the aircraft with a team. Having more marshals should give you an advantage, but not if they’re butterballs.
Shooting is a muscle-memory thing. We got to shoot 200 rounds at the range a month — if you were lucky. You need to be shooting every single week to be accurate, and we weren’t.
We were tested on the practical pistol course, which is used by most police agencies. You’re shooting targets from three, five, seven, 15 and 25 yards. We didn’t test on a tactical pistol course, which is harder and was designed specifically to train a guy to shoot in an airplane. On that one, you’re shooting everything from seven yards, but it’s in quick succession. That got phased out in the summer of 2002 because it was too difficult to pass. They couldn’t get enough guys through.
So you have no way to say, we have this number of guys who are qualified to shoot a gun inside an airplane.
I’m not trying to say these guys weren’t good guys, and I’m not saying these guys couldn’t shoot well.
But if something bad happens, they’re not going to say that our standard of training was too low. They’re going to say that the field agent hit an innocent bystander and that’s inexcusable. They’re not going to blame it on their own administrative decisions.
I’m coming forward because all of this needs to be said if it’s ever going to be fixed. These problems have existed for a long time, and people need to be held accountable.