Originally Posted by greatam
For the life of me, I cannot understand why they must be incognito. Most of the American flying public ASSUMES there is a FAM on EVERY flight (not FT). All my friends who fly infrequently always make a game trying to spot the FAM.
You answered your own question there.
The reason that FAMs are incognito is to keep people from catching on to the fact that there most certainly is NOT a FAM on every flight. Probably not on most. Where would all the money to pay them come from? There are 20,000+ commercial flights per day in the U.S., and the entire air marshal corps is not that large - I think I remember reading about the approx. number being something in the low thousands: 3,000 FAMs?