Doors to cross-check, stun guns at the ready: Korean Air admits to tasering unruly passengers

CABIN crew on Korean Air flights have used electrical stun weapons to pacify flyers on 5 events, according to an investigation by the BBC. The report says that South Korea’s nationwide service is the one huge airline identified to fly with such tasers on board. They had been first launched on its planes in 2002.

According to the Beeb, the airline is now “ramping up coaching for workers utilizing the weapons after criticism for the way in which it dealt with a latest in-flight disturbance”. In that occasion, an all-female cabin crew apparently took 4 hours to subdue a drunk passenger, with different paying flyers pressured to assist them accomplish that.

Allowing flight attendants to make use of weapons on planes is troubling. If it takes demure crew a number of hours to pacify a drunkard, it won’t take a lot for a ne’er-do-well to take the weapon from them for his personal means. And irrespective of how properly skilled the crew are at dealing with a taser, they had been presumably not chosen by the airline for his or her dead-eye skills. The hazard of one thing going incorrect is just too nice.

If somebody have to be answerable for electrocuting flyers, it needs to be a licensed law-enforcement officer. Even then, there are many causes for warning.

An incident right now highlights one drawback. Police in Bristol tasered certainly one of their very own race-relations advisors within the face after apparently mistaking him for a wished man. It appears that when officers have easy accessibility to a weapon, they won’t at all times hearth it as a final resort, however typically on the first signal of bother.

In some international locations Air Marshals routinely fly on flights, armed with actual weapons loaded with modified ammunition that doesn’t pierce home windows, decreasing the possibility of the airplane dropping cabin stress abruptly when bullets go skewiff. But the truth that bullets would possibly go astray ought to give harmless flyers in tightly-packed cabins pause for thought. And though a terrorist could discover it much less simple to disarm an Air Marshall than an air hostess, it’s nonetheless a risk. 

There are counterfactuals to contemplate: we do not know what number of potential assaults on El Al, for instance, had been deterred by the presence of armed officers, who fly on each certainly one of its planes. With Korean Air and tasers, that isn’t a consideration as a result of few passengers knew that they had been stowed on board. Furthermore, firing stun weapons can have horrible penalties. Last 12 months Dalian Atkinson, an ex-professional footballer, died after being tasered by police in Birmingham. His loss of life was the 11th linked to the weapon’s use in Britain, according to the Guardian. So there may be good purpose to ensure that the particular person utilizing a taser to dispense justice is just not trigger-fingered. 

If there’s a ray of excellent information in Korean Air’s case, it’s that no less than it’s the flight attendants who’re being skilled to make use of the taser, and never the administration. In 2014 Heather Cho, an govt on the airline and the chairman’s daughter, obtained so irate with cabin crew who had served her some poorly offered nuts, that she assaulted a member of the workforce with a folder after which pressured the airplane to taxi again to the terminal at JFK to unload the hapless flight attendants. Ms Cho was given a suspended jail sentence for her meltdown. Thank goodness she didn’t have a stun gun.