DCA FAM Observations
 

I have had several flights in/out of DCA since the beginning of the year. I'd guess that on at least half of them, I haven't seen FAM in the F section. This has been on AA, while sitting in the F cabin. If they were on the airplane, they had to have been sitting in coach, because the aisle seats in F definitely didn't contain a FAM (unless they are now taking window seats which is doubtful).

I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this phenomenon. Either flights to/from DCA do not require FAM's any longer, or they are sitting in coach sometimes. Regardless of the reason, it's freeing up 1 or 2 seats (yep, seen two FAM's in F before) for an airline customer versus the seat getting wasted by a FAM.

What makes you so sure no FAMS are on board ?

They're easy to spot if you are the one fo the first there people to board. The FAM is the guy already sitting in a seat! I have been teh firs person to board several times with someone already sitting in a seat. Always in FC, too.

--PP

Not as easy as you think then, apparently.

Even easier stand by the gate when it opens and watch for two people to approach the counter and try to sneakily show their ID to GAs so that they can be given seats.

Dan

Do a search here and you will find plenty of ways to find a FAM on a plane. They make themselves easily identifiable.

I am hoping this means that you guys are now really undercover, instead of the previous weak effort at it. Not that i completely blame the FAMs here - I realize some of it (dress code) was imposed from above. Still, sometimes in the past, it seemed like the FAMs weren't really trying. That turns the FAM program from a security program of debatable worth into a law enforcement jobs program of no worth whatsoever. I've said it here before, but I'll say it again - if you want to go about this the right way, no one on the plane, with the possible exception of the captain, should know who you are, including the FAs. Especially the FAs. If that level of confidentiality is impossible, you should wear a uniform. No point in half measures.

What's the reason for the FA's to be kept in the dark?:confused:

Concerns about FA complicity with a criminal element perhaps?

Mostly it's under the "fewer that know, the better off" line of thinking.

I would have to disagree with this statement...

I agree with this! ^ ^ ^

As always, this is a popular topic. DCA is a favorite spot for FAMs. I know FAMS lurk here so I'll just say, I find it incredibly sloppy of you to do your thing on a plane in cognito, then buddy up with your partner after the flight deplanes, then reboard another plane. If I can pick out this behavior, what prevents others from doing the same thing? Keep the facade up the whole way, for your own safety for God's sakes. Sometimes the stupidity just boggles the mind.

A lot of guys I know make themselves obvious hoping people will complain so maybe some change will occur if enough people get disgusted and complain.

As for the FAs, from what I hear they're the second worst group to out FAMs.

Hear, hear!! I hope that the old ways of the FAM s being forced to board first are OVER! I don't want those guys to have to break cover unless something is REALLY going wrong, and a scuffle with an unruly pax that some big guys have effectively put down doesn't count. Such a diversion could easily be used to try to get teh FAMs to break cover.

They finally, after enough humiliating publisity, apparently started allowing the FAMs to dress in a mode appropriate for the time of year and destination. I have long been a proponent of the perfunctory meeting between the PIC and the FAM(s) takign place in a secure area far away from the boarding gate, and only the guys with the ATP tickets should know who the FAMs are. The reason for the FAs not knowing is that in a situation that appears to be getting out of control, it would be almost impossible for their eyes not to go to the FAM if the FAs know where he or they are sitting. Their presence is too important and their cover to valuable to let anythign give it away until, in the FAM's judgement, they NEED to break cover.

Having said this, I think if there is more than one FAM on board, they need to know where the other one is. Now here's a question to debate, and I'd like the FAM's imput on this:

If there is an armed LEO on board for whatever reason that is NOT an FAM, local law enforcement, FBI, secret service, whoever...should the FAMs know who and where they are, should the non-FAM LEOs know abou the FAMs on board, and should they all caucus before the flight?

--PP

You need to put yourself in the shoes of a hijacker. Lets say its a nice big three-class trans-atlantic flight. I'm a bad guy. I want to know where the FAMs (who have cleverly disguised themselves) are hiding. I grab an FA, pull her into the galley, and tell her she can either give up the FAMs or get hurt. Presumably, I'm far ruder and more threatening in real life, than on Flyertalk :)

If the FA knows, he or she can splll the beans, then the FAMs might get taken out quickly. Basically, its a question of why the FAMs are on board. Are they security guards to handle rowdy passengers at the FA's direction? If so, they can wear uniforms. Otherwise, they need to be undercover, which does not include informing FAs. Informing the captain seems a reasonable accommodation.

I'm certainly not a FAM, but I'd be surprised if they were happy about folks who didn't have their training or knew their procedures having sidearms on the plane. Especially, local law enforcement, where training standards can really run the gamut, from highly trained professionals to Barney Fife.

Are FFDO's trained by the same folks who train the FAMs or by FAMs themselves? That would seem logical, but I realize that logic may not be at play in these sorts of things.

There would have to be a sure procedure for the FAM to identify themselves to the FA in the case in which they needed to break cover. Otherwise, it would be possible that someone causes a situation, a fake FAM breaks cover and then has quite a bit of power on-board.

OK, so nobody knows there's an FAM on the plane. How do we know who is and is not an air marshal in an emergency?

If there's no way of knowing that these guys are who they claim to be because nobody on the flight has authenticated in advance, passengers and crew might have to assume that anyone with a gun who's doing something suspicious is a hijacker.

None of the pax will know what the secret FAM ID card looks like, so they can't judge whether it's real, and even if some of the FAs have, ID cards can be forged.

The second worst? Who's the worst then? FAMs themselves? :D

Please explain. I'm open to debate on this one.

As a LEO I like to see the other LEO's faces, which helps avoid a blue-on-blue event should the balloon go up. That said, I am NOT for face to face if it requires preboarding or any other type of overt meeting where God and everyone gets to now know who the people with guns are.

Do it away from the plane/gate/etc. and its cool. I'll buy the coffee. Doing it at the gate or on the plane? Suicide.

The gate agent, ticket agent and TSA has already verified them. How many is enough? Checking ID is not security, remember?

I thought checking ID is not security? :confused:

Its the tin that civilians want to see. LEOs want to see the creds.

Gate agents.

I would respectfully submit that this entire conversation is meaningless. There will never be another attempt to replicate 9/11 for many reasons. These would include, but not be limited to: a) change in the cockpit procedures; b) change in the cockpit doors; c) hiring of more FAM's; d) possibility that you might be stopped for taking a weapon on the flight; e) public awareness.

Why? Not because these safeguards are working (which is why this discussion is, IMHO, off-point). It is because they exist and, in combination, they might hinder a successful plan.

On 9/11 the chance that the flight crew would resist was less than 10% (it was procedure to cooperate); the door was irrelevant because of the procedure; there were very few FAM's; the weapons they allegedly used were legal (i.e. - no scanning errors were required - they were legal); and the public awareness (at least until the last of the 4 planes) was not raised.

In other words, on 9/11, the chance that the plot would succeed, on multiple planes, was well over 90%. Today, the chance that a *similar* plot would succeed, on multiple planes, is probably under 50%. So why invest resources in something that will probably fail, when you can do something which will probably succeed?

Why do we focus on airplanes? (Before you respond too quickly, don't say 9/11 - bombs on planes (liquids) have nothing to do with 9/11 - there were earlier examples of people blown up on planes, and there are other places where you could harm more people in a single incident than an airplane).

If they're flying completely in secret, the gate and ticket agents didn't necessarily verify. And none of them are on the plane in any event, so what good does that do in the middle of a situation?

So you could end up with a group who gets guns through security (plenty of ideas have been suggested on how to do that) and now they're on the plane claiming to be FAMs, but nobody on the plane can verify whether they are or not. The crew wouldn't know if they're FAMs or hijackers.

Exactly what I said. If no one securely authenticates these guys on the ground and transmits that info to the crew, then there's no way of knowing whether they're hijackers or FAMs.

ID cards, "tin" or other pieces of paper or plastic aren't proof of anything, no matter how fancy-looking. The only way to have a reasonable level of security (reasonable, but still not 100%) is for there to be a realtime authentication, with biometric, against a secure database or something like that.

Easy. In 99% of emergencies, you wait for the passengers and crew to get everything under control. Then if there are FAMs on board they'll usually ID themselves and "take it from there."

After all, the FAMs aren't actually supposed to help in most emergencies, for fear they would out themselves prematurely if the "emergency" is only a diversion for the real action the bad guys have in mind.

So in the situation described by Bruce Schneier in post #18, what do the passengers and crew do to get things under control?

And, once again, if the crew don't know who the FAMs are, how does an FAM identify himself at 30,000 feet in a credible manner?

Right, but what happens in the situation where it's unclear if the FAMs are really FAMs or hijackers creating an emergency and pretending to diffuse it?

The passengers subdue Men A, B and C, the FAs handcuff them all and the pilot lands the plane, just as they'd do if no FAM were on board in the first place.

Who cares? FAMs are virtually useless anyway.

Of course there are several hints to help sort things out. The pilots can radio to find out who the FAMs are. Presumably the crew knows what legit FAM id looks like. And the two guys with the sidearms are much more likely to be real FAMs than those without, since FAMs are known to pack heat and never work alone.

The bottom line is that I believe the whole FAM program should be scrapped. But I don't want to hijack yet another thread with that argument. After all, the FAM program is supposed to prevent hijackings, right? ;)

You WILL find out really, really fast who the FAMs are if you try that without the FA having to breathe a word.:rolleyes:

One of the contributing factors to the all-but-obvious white neon sign that reads "air marshal" above the air marshals is watching how the FAs defer to them. It's an unbelievably easy 'tell'.

I think that the intervening 5-1/2 years has shown conclusively that passengers are now extremely willing to take positive action and if someone tries rushing the cockpit door, that person is going to be beaten senseless, perhaps lifeless, before he can do much more than scratch the paint. I am a 100 percent FAN of that plan, too. The plain and simple fact is that a terrorist is not going to be able to fight off 100 or more passengers. If the object of the game is ever to use an airplane as a guided missile again, that's not going to get past the snap of the ball before pax put it down with extreme prejudice. If anything, the FAs may have to stop the resulting retaliation against the offending terrorist before he winds up with his head and his shoulders in two different lavatories at landing.

As for keeping a bomb off the airplane, we need to be a hell of a lot more worried about cargo than we are about shampoo.

--PP

Where's the evidence for this? So far when people have identified themselves as air marshals, the passengers have just sat quietly, with the one exception of the guy who got shot (and wasn't mentally right in the first place). Otherwise there are a number of stories of pax sitting for an hour or more with their hands above their heads while FAM(s) hold guns on them.

What do you mean who cares? It makes a difference whether the guy trying to control the passengers is a FAM who wants to land the plane safely or a terrorist who wants to crash the plane into a building, doesn't it?

Radioing the ground might work (though initially that's only going to tell you if the airline knows whether there's supposed to be FAMs on the flight, not who the FAMs are). FAs may know what their ID is supposed to look like, but IDs can be faked.

But that doesn't answer the question. As I mention a few lines up, so far when someone pulls a gun and claims to be a FAM, the pax sit quietly. It's unlikely that the pax are going to try to beat senseless someone claiming to be a FAM who also has a gun.

If a fake FAM pulls this routine and the crew, especially the FAs, don't know whether he's legit or not, he's probably going to get the same deference as a real FAM, giving him (and presumably his partner(s)) quite an advantage. By the time anyone starts to figure out that these guys are lying, it could be too late.

No, I mean everyone on this board says that checking ID is not security. So why is checking FAMs ID somehow security? :confused:

It's not. That's exactly what I said in my response to you - that there has to be something more than an offline ID card to securely authenticate that someone is who he claims to be and is authorized to do something (e.g. carry a gun on a plane).

For example, in my educational institution, when I swipe my ID card the computer not only verifies that it's still valid, but it shows a picture of me to the security guard so he can make sure that I'm using my ID. This stops me from making a fake ID because there would be no record of it in the computer, and stops me from using someone else's valid ID that I've stolen because my face wouldn't match their picture. And this all happens at the same time. If the database is sufficiently secure, this is reasonable security.

Or think of a LEO. If you get pulled over by a cop he calls your drivers license in. Just because the card says you're licensed to drive, it doesn't mean that it's not fake, revoked or that something else hasn't happened in the months or years since you got that piece of plastic that materially changes the situation. These are things he can verify in realtime using a database.

On the other hand, someone showing up at the airport with ID that isn't checked in any way except by someone looking at it to see if the picture matches is not security.

Also, you're mixing up the "ID isn't security" argument. That's usually applied to passengers when the argument is made that by just showing a piece of plastic to someone security is increased. This isn't security because, among other reasons, IDs don't say "terrorist" or "non-terrorist" on them, so there's no value here.

Now I got you. Many LEOs have been asking for a biometric form of ID that could be used at all airports that would work like SIDA access (thereby bypassing security which is pretty obvious for LEOs) and that would transmit the data you're talking about. The problem is cost. Its pretty prohibitive.

This is just par for the course of TSA spending money in stupid things that won't help security (shoe carnivals, water carnivals, etc) while ignoring something that could have a more tangible effect on security.

If cost isn't a concer when it comes to decorating offices, handing out lifetime achievement awards to a then 2 year old agency, why would it balk at spending money on real security?

I think the answer to that question is rhetorical though.

Hand geometry readers with PIN pads are pretty old hat by now. A reasonable credential for FAMs would be a combination of a difficult to counterfeit ID card (holograms, RFID) and a one-time ticket generated from the hand geometry/pin reader with a daily code which would match a code on the FA's flight manifest. If the FAM had to identify him/herself, they could authenticate by comparing the one-time code on their daily ticket to that on the FA's manifest. That's just one way. This sort of technology is routinely used for data center access.

Another is a one-time pad authentication token (changes daily) which is incorperated into the FAM's credentials and could be compared to the manifest. That technology is being tested in credit cards now.

Everything I just described is off the shelf. A fake FAM who doesn't authenticate properly either gets nabbed by a real FAM (and yes, they should know who each other are) or by the other passengers, if necessary, after the FA raises the alarm.

I agree that "tin" is useless, but we civilians are strangely reassured by it. Please accept our TV-fueled love for badge-wielding cops. Marshall Dylon would never be caught without his tin star, after all.

This is probably something that could be rolled into TWIC, no? (If/when that happens.)

Ok - enough about the debate on ID's & FAM's - get your own thread! ;)

The topic is have you noticed a flight to/from DCA where there was not a FAM in F?

As usual, there were two FAMs in F across the aisle from each other on my 100% full 9 PM flight from ORD to DCA. They never spoke while on the flight, but I saw them walking together and chatting after deboarding. Why does DHS follow this ridiculous routine on every flight? The FAMs stick out like sore thumbs and are easily recognized by any terrorist. The FAMs SHOULD move around on the plane and board with regular passengers if they truly want to surprise a terrorist. :td: