Original subtitles

A passenger plane is obliterated

in the California hills.

There were no wings, no fuselage.

There was no tail section.

There were no aircraft seats.

Hardened steel is ripped to pieces.

This was the worst damage I've ever seen.

The wreckage paints a grim picture

of the final moments of Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 1771.

The plane reached impossibly high speeds.

They told us that

it actually broke the sound barrier.

Passengers experienced crippling G-forces.

We assessed the impact force as around 5,000 GS.

It would have been a horrifying experience,

the final few seconds of their lives.

Whatever brought down flight 1771,

investigators are certain of one thing--

it was not an accident.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we are starting our approach.

We lost both engines!

Put the mask over your nose.

Emergency descent.

Mayday, mayday.

Brace for impact!

I think I lost one.

Investigation starting...

He's gonna crash!

Los Angeles International Airport,

one of the busiest in the world.

Every year, 40 million passengers arrive and depart

through LAX.

At terminal one,

a group of passengers and crew bound for San Francisco

are making their way through security.

A short while later,

they board Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 1771.

Pacific Southwest really was a,

what we'd call a large regional airline at the time.

Could you set me up with a scotch on your way back?

They had service in about 30 cities

all over mostly the Western part of the United States.

The flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco

is one of the most popular routes at Pacific Southwest,

also known as PSA.

Among the 38 passengers are several PSA employees,

including the airline's chief pilot.

It's very common for airline employees

to commute between cities for work.

And so as people would take a bus to work,

many airline employees take a plane to work.

Captain Gregg Lindamood

has been flying with PSA for 14 years.

The father of three is also a decorated combat veteran.

-Brakes. -Brakes set.

Flaps up.

Spoilers retracted.

First officer James Nunn

only joined the airline the previous spring.

He's also logged thousands of hours in the cockpit.

Thrust levers.

Today, they're piloting

a British-built BAE-146 commuter jet.

With quiet turbofan engines,

it's designed for short haul flights

over densely populated areas.

The flight to San Francisco

will take just over an hour.

So do you know what you're getting the boys for Christmas?

Well, it's gonna be Nintendo,

and with what it costs, I think they can both share it.

Anything to drink, guys?

No, I'm fine, thanks.

Okay, just holler if you change your mind.

Flight 1771 is cruising at 22,000 feet

above the California Countryside.

Can you ask them how it's been?

Just over halfway through the flight,

captain Lindamood worries about the mild turbulence.

Center, PSA 1771. Any reports on the ride ahead?

We've had a little continuous, light chop.

PSA, this is Rocky Mountain Center.

It's not too bad.

Oh, my god, that was a gun.

The crew now has a much bigger problem

on its hands.

Squawk 77, Squawk 77.

We've had a gun fired on board the aircraft.

Do you want to go to Monterey?

Could you make it, sir?

Moments later,

flight 1771 falls into a steep dive.

Witnesses caught a brief glimpse of the aircraft

as it was plummeting down from the sky.

It was going at a high rate of speed.

Looked like a dart just diving to the ground.

Flight 1771 crashes into an isolated hill

170 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

Police get to the crash site,

and find a 33-ton airliner obliterated.

There were no wings.

There were no fuselage.

There was no, there was no tail section.

There were no aircraft seats.

There was just papers, papers everywhere,

and the strong smell of aviation fuel.

It doesn't take long for sheriff Steve Bolts

to reach a grim conclusion.

No one has survived the crash.

We're making a frantic search

throughout this remote cow pasture

looking for survivors,

and we can't even find deceased human beings,

much less human beings that had survived.

Most catastrophic aircraft accidents

happen on takeoff or landing.

A shallow impact angle can sometimes leave

large sections of the plane intact,

giving passengers and crew a chance at survival.

The 43 people aboard flight 1771 had no chance at all.

This is one of the worst air disasters in California history.

Come on up here, guys.

The day after the crash, investigators from both

the National Transportation Safety Board and the FBI

are on the scene.

You ever seen anything like this?

This is gonna be a long day, guys.

We knew that gunshots had been heard

by the air traffic controllers.

Squawk 77, squawk 77.

We've had a gun fired on board the aircraft.

If the reports of gunshots were accurate,

then I realized immediately

that we had crime aboard an aircraft,

for which the FBI had primary jurisdiction.

But the reports may not be accurate.

The pilots and controllers may have been mistaken.

Even though speculation

about the gunman's identity is widespread,

it's up to the NTSB to determine exactly what happened

on flight 1771.

It should be somewhere in here.

One of the things you have to avoid

in an accident investigation is preconceived notions.

For example, most of us never turn on the radio,

never watch television on the way to the scene,

because, even though you might not consciously be aware of it,

you can get front loaded with information,

and when you get there,

you may subconsciously start looking for things

to substantiate that background.

So you try to arrive on scene with a totally objective view

of what's going on.

While NTSB investigators try to determine

the cause of the crash,

law enforcement agents have questions of their own.

It's establishing who had motive,

establishing who had access,

establishing who was the intended victim.

Right there.

They should be somewhere right in there.

The FBI is searching for evidence of a crime--

the NTSB for clues about the crash.

If they can recover both the black boxes, they may find both.

With the total destruction of the aircraft,

I mean, you had limited amounts of information

that you could gather from the wreckage.

At this point, the most important thing

is to get the cockpit voice recorder

and get away from the speculation

and see what the cockpit voice recorder tells us factually.

The flight recorders tell the tale

of what happens to the aircraft.

They're very important in reconstructing the events

that brought the airplane down.

The impact comes in this way, then the tail...

They should be somewhere in here.

I think that's it.

After hours of searching

through the shattered remains,

the effort finally pays off.

They recover the plane's two black boxes.

The first recorder that was recovered

was the cockpit voice recorder,

and that was recognized by its orange cover,

and all that was still, although badly mangled,

was still recognizable as a recorder.

The second black box has suffered

even heavier damage.

The flight data recorder captures critical information

about the aircraft's performance.

What a mess.

What a mess.

It had been so badly mangled,

it wasn't recognizable as a flight data recorder.

Both recorders will be sent to the NTSB laboratory

in Washington.

It is far from certain

whether the data they hold can be successfully retrieved.

Without it, investigators may never know

what happened on flight 1771.

That's about the first thing you do

when you get on scene-- find the cockpit voice recorder.

You can't over emphasize how important that was in this case,

because we had no airframe left to work with.

We really had no wreckage, in the normal sense of the word.

At the NTSB laboratory in Washington,

Dennis Grossi examines

flight 1771's badly damaged cockpit voice recorder.

The case itself was basically crushed.

It was bent in like somebody grabbed it

and pushed it together like that.

And this is hardened steel.

And we assessed the impact force as around 5,000 GS,

just based on the deformation of the crash enclosure.

The recorder, the aircraft, and everyone on board

suffered an impact force 5,000 times the force of gravity.

The world's best fighter pilots

can handle a sustained force of nine GS.

In a crash, the human body can sometimes survive 100 GS

for a split second.

A force 50 times as strong is difficult to comprehend.

Dennis Grossi knows the immense impact

may have ruined any chance of hearing the last words

from the cockpit of flight 1771.

No crash investigation is routine,

but among the jigsaw puzzle of pieces from flight 1771,

investigators are looking for something very different--

perhaps a gun.

Finding the weapon could help the FBI identify

who might have fired shots on board flight 1771.

But for the NTSB, gunfire alone does not explain this accident.

A bullet should not bring down a modern commercial jet.

There's a lot of misconception

about decompression and about whether or not,

for example, a single shot could bring down an aircraft.

And if it's simply a shot through the fuselage

of the aircraft, the answer would be no.

It takes a much larger hole in the fuselage

for there to be an explosive decompression,

the kind of hole that led to one of the deadliest air disasters

of all time.

In 1974,

a faulty cargo door blew off Turkish Airlines flight 981.

The decompression caused the cabin floor to collapse,

severing the flight control cables.

The crash killed all 346 people on board.

The aircraft would normally not come down

just from a bullet hole with no other implications.

It just wouldn't be enough

to cause an explosive decompression,

which is what you almost have to have to bring the aircraft down.

If a gunshot didn't bring the plane down,

then investigators need to find out what did.

At the NTSB lab in Washington,

work to recover flight 1771's cockpit voice recording

has produced a surprising result.

Despite suffering huge impact forces,

the audiotape is still intact.

All right, let's give it a listen.

The first 28 minutes of the tape

reveal a routine flight.

It's gonna be Nintendo.

The crew was trying to find out

when the turbulence they had been flying through would end.

Can you ask them how it's been?

Center, PSA 1771. Any reports on the ride ahead?

We've had a little continuous, light chop.

PSA, this is Rocky Mountain Center.

It's not too bad.

We hear the flight crew talk,

you know, do their normal procedures.

But in the final two minutes,

events take a chilling turn.

Sure sounds like a gunshot.

And then all of a sudden,

they hear, and we hear, on the recording this gunshot.

The tape confirms what the pilots had reported--

two gunshots.

- God, that was a gun. - Yeah, I know.

Squawk 77, squawk 77.

We've had a gun fired on board the aircraft.

It was actually a very sobering moment,

because we realized that we were listening

to two people communicating with each other,

the pilot and the co-pilot,

in a very routine flight

that suddenly became anything but routine.

It was something that one doesn't quickly forget.

Investigators listen

as the situation becomes increasingly disturbing.

The door to the cockpit was heard to open,

and a female voice, presumably the flight attendant,

was heard to say in a voice that was filled with alarm...

There's a problem, captain!

And we heard a voice,

a male voice, which we presumed to be the captain,

saying, "what's the nature of the problem?"

-What's the problem? -

I'm the problem.

Investigators now know for certain

that the killer was a man, and that he shot the flight crew.

It's always startling

when you hear something like that,

when you hear the commission of a murder.

As accident investigators, you just don't hear that.

This was a very unusual recording.

A flight attendant and both pilots are shot.

That's five shots so far.

And then we could hear the cockpit door shut again,

and another final shot, the sixth shot.

Before the tape ends,

they hear one last ominous sound.

The plane's in a dive.

The engines are over-revving.

Within about five seconds,

we picked up what's called windscreen noise.

In other words,

you could tell that the aircraft was accelerating.

That noise increased in its pitch.

We learned, of course,

that it was going into a dive at that point.

65 seconds after the murder of its crew,

flight 1771 smashes into the California hills.

It helped us to understand

what we were investigating,

the heinousness of the crime that we were investigating.

The CVR recording changes

the NTSB's role in the case.

Let me know if I can help.

It just confirms that this wasn't an accident,

that it was, in fact, a crime,

and the FBI would be taking over the investigation

from here on out.

The FBI, bear in mind, knows how to investigate crime.

They don't necessarily know how to investigate

an aircraft accident, so we would go ahead

and do our normal investigative procedures

and make that information available to the FBI.

The FBI is investigating a murder.

But solving it is now just one of their priorities.

- What's the problem? - I'm the problem.

The CVR recording has highlighted

another pressing issue.

Somehow someone managed to get a gun

on that plane.

A weapon was smuggled through LAX,

one of the world's busiest airports.

Investigators wonder how the shooter

managed to evade airport security.

Let's find out how that guy got on the plane,

all right?

If the FBI can't find answers soon,

more lives could be at risk.

Two days after the downing of flight 1771.

Investigators are still combing through the wreckage

for a piece of evidence rarely found at a crash site...

A murder weapon.

That's a hydraulic line,

probably from the main gear.

The search for the gun was very frustrating,

because we knew that played a major role

in what had happened.

We needed to know for sure that the gun was there.

I mean, it's a supposition, a pretty good supposition

that there's a gun involved.

We weren't sure that we would succeed,

because the field of debris was so wide

and the impact had reduced the airplane

to so many small pieces.

While the search for the gun continues in California,

NTSB investigators in Washington try to determine

what caused flight 1771 to go into a sudden dive

after the crew was shot.

Dennis Grossi believes the answer may lie

in the shattered remains of the FDR, the flight data recorder.

The internal magazine that held the tape

was the only part that was actually recovered.

The rest was not recovered.

Worse still,

almost all the tape that records data is gone,

torn from the machine when it slammed into the ground.

This was the worst damage I've ever seen.

Grossi examines a critical part of the recorder,

the tape heads that lay down data onto the magnetic tape.

He finds a tiny piece of recording tape has survived.

The magazine didn't survive,

and the tape itself was destroyed

except for about a six- to eight-inch piece of tape

that ran around the recording heads and the capstan.

With such a short piece of tape,

it's doubtful there will be any useful information on it at all.

We worked real hard at trying to get all the data

that we could off of that little piece of tape.

Investigators in California finally find

what they've been hunting for...

The barrel of a gun.

The gun was found by one of the FBI agents

pretty much in the middle of where the aircraft impacted.

We were very, very fortunate when we found the gun.

It was an unbelievable stroke of luck.

It's not just any gun.

It's a .44 caliber magnum.

The .44 magnum was considered

the most powerful handgun that you can have.

But the barrel alone isn't enough.

They need the rest of the weapon.

Fortunately, they find it...

The cylinder with six spent cartridges.

Its frame was very powerfully constructed,

so for it to tear the barrel off

just suggests the power of that crash impact.

The shattered pistol leads to a morbid discovery.

When we found what was left of the gun,

there was a portion of the finger between the trigger

and the trigger guard.

That went back to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia.

Lab analysis may help solve a mystery

that hangs over the entire investigation.

The FBI has a weapon, a crime scene,

and 42 murder victims.

What's missing is proof of the identity

of the 43rd person on board-- the killer.

We, in our investigation today

here at the site have located a weapon,

and that weapon is going to be examined,

and, of course, any connection between it and the crime

will be more fully developed.

We needed to determine a motive

for why someone would do such a thing.

Somebody would have had to fire those gunshots,

and there had to be a reason for it.

It's part of a seat and part of the frame.

Really, as far as the investigation on scene,

it's totally NTSB as far as the kicking the tin, if you will.

But we were able to answer questions that might arise

from the FBI investigators on the scene.

As I say, they don't have the expertise

to know what to look for,

but from the criminal aspects of it,

they certainly know what to ask about.

At the crash site,

the NTSB has recovered a piece of wreckage

that could help explain what happened on flight 1771--

a fragment of a passenger seat.

We actually found a seat

that had a bullet hole in it.

If they can determine

exactly where the seat was located,

then PSA's passenger seating records

could give investigators

the name of another one of the victims shot

before the plane went down.

Dennis Grossi has done all he can

to salvage data from the small fragment of tape

recovered from the flight data recorder.

I was able to decode that little strip of tape,

and I got the last seconds.

It does contain data, but only six seconds' worth.

Investigators learn that in its final moments,

the aircraft was operating normally

with no mechanical problems,

except for one thing.

Someone had pushed the control column forward,

forcing the plane into a steep dive.

The aircraft accelerated to the speed of sound.

It went from 22,000 feet

with cruise power on all four engines.

Investigators now understand why

only very small pieces of wreckage were found

at the crash site.

When the aircraft hit at such a high speed,

it impacted and basically compressed the earth,

and then, then it released,

and it blew everything back out of the hole.

The heavy impact propelled some debris

straight back into the air

before it could be singed by the explosion.

All the light material,

all of the paper on the aircraft,

any of the insulation material on the aircraft,

all that light stuff got blown up into the air

and then the wind carried it for, I believe, miles.

The fact that the plane was forced into a dive

explains why PSA 1771 crashed so quickly.

It also adds even greater urgency

to the FBI investigation.

Since it was almost certainly

the killer's hand on the controls,

this is now the worst mass murder in California history.

But investigators still don't have enough evidence

to be certain who the killer was,

nor whom he was trying to kill.

Was it the work of a madman who wanted to commit mass murder?

Or did the killer target one particular passenger

and coldly sacrifice everyone else on board?

The FBI investigation into the onboard shooting

and fatal crash of PSA flight 1771

has uncovered a lapse in security at LAX.

It may explain how a gun was smuggled onto the aircraft.

Any number of people in the airport

could bypass the security screening that was going on.

Agent Bretzing learns that airline employees

with valid identification

are allowed to bypass security at LAX.

What they had set up is a bypass for crew members

and airport employees,

actually anybody that had the proper badge.

You would show your badge, and they would allow you to bypass

both the metal detector and the x-ray unit.

It was a big loophole.

Bretzing knows the killer was a man.

And from flight 1771's passenger manifest,

he can see that there were four male passengers

who worked for either Pacific Southwest

or its parent airline, U.S. Air.

It's one of these guys.

We suppose that he did, in fact, bypass security

carrying the weapon.

Investigators need to prove conclusively

who smuggled the gun on board.

At the FBI laboratory,

forensic specialists analyze the piece of skin

found in the trigger guard.

A technician is able to get a fingerprint

from the skin fragment.

In search of a match,

he compares the print to those on file

for the four male passengers who could have bypassed security.

And he finds a match.

There was enough of the forefinger

that they were able to peel open and then match it.

Just days after the crash that claimed 43 lives,

the FBI has positively identified the killer.

That was a key element in the investigation.

His name is David Burke.

David Burke cleaned the airline.

He was one of those employees who would go in after it landed

and help clean up the inside.

Investigators now know David Burke smuggled a gun

on board flight 1771.

What they now need to explain is why.

A motive gives you understanding.

It helps to develop a full mosaic of the crime.

Knowing the motive,

you're able to conclusively determine what happened.

Day three at the crash site.

Still sifting through the strewn remains of the plane,

investigators uncover a bizarre but telling piece of evidence,

one that points directly to the motive

behind David Burke's crime.

During the search,

one of our people found an airsickness bag,

and knew immediately

that it was a pertinent piece to the puzzle.

Because he pushed the plane into such a steep dive...

Burke unwittingly ensured

that the vital clue could be uncovered.

The airsickness bag had a very ominous message

penned on it.

Burke had written the unsigned note during the flight.

He expressed a grudge against a man called "Ray."

"Hi, Ray."

"I think it's sort of ironical that we end up like this."

"I asked for some leniency for my family, remember?"

Well, I got none, and you'll get none."

that was the message that we recovered

from that airsickness bag.

The airsickness bag is the conclusive clue

they've been searching for,

the clue that establishes David Burke's motive.

The "Ray" in the note is identified as

airline station manager Ray Thomson.

He worked for PSA's Parent Company, U.S. Air.

He was also David Burke's former boss.

Ray Thomson was the supervisor.

By now, Bretzing has also learned

that burke had a troubled history,

both with the company and with the law.

Burke had worked for U.S. Air for 14 years,

most of them at the airport in Rochester, New York.

There was allegations of criminal activity

when he was back in Rochester.

Burke was someone they had watched carefully

for narcotic trafficking and larceny.

Allegations that burke smuggled cocaine

on commercial flights were never proven.

Well, basically,

he just apparently stayed one step ahead of us,

but the bottom line is that he wasn't charged.

He moved to the west coast,

presumably to kind of get away from the heat, if you would.

But three weeks before the crash,

burke ran into more trouble.

He was fired from the company after being caught on tape

helping himself to the in-flight bar proceeds.

He had stolen some money from the fund

that the flight attendants use when they're making change,

and he had stolen what amounted to $69.

And this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Three weeks after being fired,

Burke was given an opportunity to appeal.

Mr. Burke had been terminated

several weeks prior to the flight.

Thanks for coming in, David.

He then came back for an appeal hearing

on the day of the flight.

I've reviewed your file.

He was terminated by Ray Thomson.

Your appeal, it's been denied.

Under intense financial pressure,

Burke was near the end of his rope.

Why you got to be such a jerk?

That termination interview was not a placid one.

My decision's final, Mr. Burke.

Thank you very much.

As he left Thomson's office,

Burke made a remark that hinted at plans for revenge.

The secretary had said,

"David, I hope you have a nice day."

and David Burke, the suspect, paused at the door,

turned to her and said...

Oh, I plan to have a very nice day.

When he was fired, he still had his credentials.

You got to remember, this was 1987.

Security was a whole lot different than it is now.

What have you got there?

Investigators now know that

in the days leading up to the crash,

David Burke went from aggrieved ex-employee

to a man coldly planning murder.

Now they need to find out all they can

about his movements on the day of the crash.

What can you tell me about David Burke?

After his meeting with Thomson's,

he went to his locker, possibly to get the gun.

But he went to his locker the day of that flight

prior to the flight.

Whether he retrieved his gun from the locker or not,

we are not sure.

Instead of returning to the office,

Burke decided to buy a ticket for flight 1771,

a flight he knew Ray Thomson would be on.

Ray Thomson lived in San Francisco,

and he flew regularly on that flight

to return to San Francisco at the end of the day.

It was common knowledge among the employees

that Ray Thomson would be on that, on that flight.

Why Burke opted to kill so many others

along with his former boss

is a question that defies rational explanation.

The average person certainly would not act

with the rage and the vengeance that had to consume David Burke

prior to this act.

One can only imagine that

there must have been something else wrong with David Burke.

He just decided to take it out as an act of revenge

against a company,

and I don't know that there's any other motivation

we can come up with.

It's clear Burke's attack on flight 1771

was meticulously planned.

But exactly how events unfolded once his rampage began

is still uncertain.

NTSB investigators have provided a big piece of the puzzle.

They've been able to match up

the bullet-punctured seat fragment

with an exact onboard location-- row four, seat C.

Records show that on flight 1771 that seat was unoccupied.

But the seat directly in front of that empty seat

was occupied--

by Ray Thomson.

The finding points to the sheer power

of Burke's .44 caliber handgun.

His first two shots pierced not one, but two airline seats.

The bullet hole would have been made

as the bullet passed through Ray Thomson

and then entered that seat and left a bullet hole there.

They now know that Burke shot at least four people

during his rage-filled assault on flight 1771--

Ray Thomson and three crew members.

That accounts for five shots.

But investigators heard six shots on the tape.

They must account for them all.

The gunshot sounds were picked up

by a microphone in the cockpit.

By comparing the sound pattern of each shot,

investigators can determine if they were fired in the cockpit

or the passenger cabin.

The shots that were fired in the plane,

not in the cockpit, but in the plane,

were distinct but muffled.

Other shots were louder and clearer,

indicating they were fired closer to the CVR microphone.

The shots that were fired in the cockpit

-were very loud. -

We had three shots

that were fired outside the cockpit

and three shots that were fired inside the cockpit.

Investigators don't know

who was shot with the final bullet,

just that it was fired in the cabin.

It's enough for them to finally piece together a picture

of the horrific final moments on board PSA's 1771.

What the hell?

You can imagine what Ray Thomson must have thought

as this person whom he had just terminated a few hours before

walks past him in the airline, hands him this note,

and then probably goes into the men's room,

and he's reading this note with its ominous message.

Next, they hear the sound

of a lavatory door opening.

So we're assuming that he handed Ray the note,

went into the restroom where he took out the gun,

came back out,

we heard the door close again just before the shots.

- Ray! -

Ray Thomson probably has the most merciful

of all the deaths on that plane.

In less than a minute,

a routine flight has become a nightmare.

There's a problem, captain.

What's the problem?

He was very careful.

He had done the planning thus far fairly well,

and we believe he followed through with that plan.

- I'm the problem. -

It wouldn't take much knowledge or experience

on a passenger part to know that they were in deep, deep trouble.

-There's a problem, captain. -

After shooting his former boss...

...and three crew members,

David Burke pushed flight 1771 into a dive

and left the cockpit.

The airline's chief pilot was now the only person on board

who could pull the plane out of the dive.

An off-duty pilot may have been moving himself forward

to try to render whatever assistance he could

once he realized something drastic was happening.

What the hell are you doing?

You got to let me in there.

Don't do this. Come on!

But Burke had one bullet left.

What the hell are you doing?

That may have accounted for the sixth shot.

There are some who speculate

that David Burke was taking his own life.

The evidence suggests otherwise.

Had David Burke been taking his own life,

the gun would have fallen from his hand

after he had shot himself.

But since a fragment of Burke's fingertip

was recovered from the trigger guard,

Bretzing reasons that the killer was alive,

holding onto the gun, until the very moment of impact.

Alarms were sounding in the cockpit.

There was increased noise of the plane plummeting.

And just before impact, it became silent.

They tell us that it actually broke the sound barrier.

Of course, it would have been a horrifying experience,

the final few seconds of their lives.

One man's rage meant two minutes of pure terror

for 42 people.

The FBI believes one man was responsible

for the crash of PSA's flight 1771

in the hills of San Luis Obispo County,

in which all 43 on board were killed.

With all of the evidence

that we have recovered here

that we would have more than sufficient

to charge David Burke

with the violation of the air piracy statute.

The unprecedented crime is solved.

But aviation authorities are left with a troubling question--

could it happen again?

The tragedy of flight 1771 provoked action

from the federal aviation administration.

The body that regulates the airline industry

took urgent measures to tighten security.

The FAA came out and canceled the bypass authority,

so therefore air crews and employees

would have to go through the normal screening,

as any passenger would.

Now it's required that

any employee that leaves an airline,

whether they've been fired or quit or retired or whatever,

must turn their credentials in immediately.

Getting on an aircraft with a gun now,

I won't say that it's impossible,

but it's next to impossible.

But the new measures would not prevent

the world's deadliest hijacking incident.

The 9/11 attacks would usher in

sweeping new airline security procedures.

After 9/11,

several security gaps were certainly plugged.

There are now federal air marshals on board

many domestic U.S. Flights.

These are armed officers that are on flights

in plain clothes.

Cockpit doors have been reinforced with Kevlar,

and they stay locked throughout all flights.

The doors are built

so that they're very hard to get through.

They're ballistically sound.

If David Burke was on a plane today,

when he got to the cockpit,

he couldn't have gotten in with the weapon he had,

so he would have been able to

still injure or kill people in the back,

but he could not have brought the plane down.

Finally, many domestic airline pilots

are now allowed to carry firearms.

All of these measures have made flying safer,

but nothing can completely eliminate the risk

of another David Burke.

Well, in my view,

aviation security has been heightened tremendously.

But we still have a ways to go,

and aviation will always be a target.