Air marshals are almost certainly trained not to intervene in minor disturbances. Otherwise a team of hijackers could locate the air marshal by having one person act as an unruly passenger.
For the last twenty years, hijackers (in flights originating from US) are probably always presumed to be suicidal and much less likely to succeed in a hijacking. To the point where I'd assume that they're rarely even attempted.
Perhaps we could end up needing air marshals in the future, a future where many passengers are not old enough to recall or be affected by the terrorist attacks on September 11.
A lot of times, I feel like this whole concept was based on an inherit deterrent and seems to have worked, in conjunction with increased airport screening:
"The number of hijackings has dwindled in recent years. About 50 have been reported since Sept, 11, 2001, and none in the U.S., according to the Aviation Safety Network."
The number of bear attacks in Springfield went to zero in 1996 when Homer started Bear Patrol. It's a case of life imitating art.
Before 9/11 you were a passenger/crewmember on a plane, you flew to Cuba, then got released, and all was well.
9/11 changed that. No longer were passengers and crew safe as long as they complied, no longer were planes allowed to fly around and even be refuelled safe in the knowledge that all it would take is some money to free them.
As such over the course of two hours the calculus changed. Hijacking the first 3 planes worked because nobody expected it. The fourth plane was also hijacked, but the goal (crashing into whatever building) wasn't met because the passengers and crew found out the rules had changed.
If you hvae 5 people willing to kill themselves for your cause, there are better ways to make a political statement now than the risk of hijacking a plane - not because of any potential air marshall, but because of the guarantee of the passengers.
It is either are or are not. Almost certainly sounds like you have no clue.
Whether that's problematic depends on a lot of things, including whether arresting people is actually the main benefit of them being present.
I have a few dogs. They bark at people walking by on the sidewalk a lot. I've never had someone break into my house. Are the dogs useless as a mechanism to prevent home invasion or burglary, or does knowledge of their presence prevent people from even attempting such? Now consider that I haven't noted whether those crimes are common in my area or not.
Maybe those dogs have growled at guests in my house, making them feel uncomfortable. Should my stance be that they've growled at more guests than intruders they've attacked? Do you feel comfortable making a definitive statement on the value of those dogs and whether the costs outweigh the benefits with the given information, or do you think additional information would be important to discerning that?
The whole point is that you can't tell whether that's happened with the data presented, regardless of what you compare it to, and no, once is not too many times given the actual thing we're discussing.
If the existence of Air Marshals prevented one more 9/11 type event from happening, or even a few failed attempts (which would be capitalized on by politicians to push their own agendas), then I would without reservation say they are worth it. We just haven't been presented with that data. In some cases it may not exist. Acting like the answer to that is irrelevant is not the correct way to go about it though, in my opinion.
No, context can be important. If all context were important, you couldn't talk about one thing without talking about every other thing. If your argument about why context is important in this case rests on if a hypothetical fact that "people arrested by police have collectively prevented more crimes than they have committed" would be uninteresting or even unfair without context, I'd deeply disagree.
There is danger there with corrupt and immoral organizations. They might just start generating false incidents and then run to save the day to pad their stats "look how effective we are!".
Luckily, that only happens with deeply corrupt organizations. Like for instance FBI [1], when they were sending their informants to mosques in US looking to recruit terrorists. Up until the the members of the mosque ended up reporting the FBI agents to the FBI.
--- Niazi and another mosque member had reported Monteilh to the FBI, claiming that Monteilh was espousing terrorist rhetoric and trying to draw them into a plot to blow up shopping malls ---
[1] https://www.ocweekly.com/news-the-fbi-the-islamic-center-of-...
I am not saying what FBI does is good, but this reminds me now that the only way to deal with constant threat of phishing is actually to create false fishing attacks all the time, so that people would be aware of the thread. Could be generally a good approach if the methods employed were more public rather than clandestine.
You could play that game with anything. How much does our military cost?
Or maybe, what was the total cost of one 9/11 airplane running into a target?
And there is the hidden properties of deterrence
Spending a few billion of taxpayer money is fine if the cost is your political career or a hit to your political party.
That depends on the deterrence of having air marshals.
The argument sounds like one that gets brought up here regularly, when executives lay off 90% of the sysadmins because "nothing ever goes wrong, so why are we paying for them?", and teams that are constantly running round looking like heroes for fixing broken stuff all the time get more kudos than the teams that keep things quietly humming along without any issues.
1. Would-be hijackers can no longer get into cockpits. Pilots would much rather a hijacker kill every passenger and crew member on the plane than gain control of the plane.
2. Passengers don't take shit anymore. They know that, if terrorists successfully take control of a plane, the most likely outcome is that they're all dead. So they'll attack -- and hopefully subdue -- the hijackers.
I expect the effects of #2 have lessened somewhat, given that 9/11 was over 20 years ago, and the memory of it is less raw (not to mention many adults who fly now were young children or not even born in 2001).
If air marshals really do act as a deterrence, there must be some evidence to back that up.
I don't think #2 actually goes away. It's a cultural shift. Prior to 9/11, the advice was always to just stay calm and let the authorities negotiate with the terrorist, because that had in the past generally led to passengers and plane surviving the incident. That level of passivity isn't coming back.
[1] https://www.securitysolutionsmedia.com/2018/04/20/air-marsha...