Am I Qualified to be an Air Marshal?
TL;DR: No.
But I got closer than I expected, and I know what I need to work on. I think I should be able to pass this qualification cleanly by the end of the summer, and I’ll definitely be working this course of fire (or a slightly modified subset thereof) into my usual drills and assessments, both for myself and other shooters.
So what the hell are we talking about, anyway?
You may have seen some variety of this FAA Air Marshal Qualification Pistol Drill floating around the internet.
So how hard is this test, really? I decided to take a crack at it. Important caveats before we continue: this test was not performed in laboratory conditions. I didn’t have any FBI QIT targets, so I used the silhouette and head/torso boxes on some generic pistol training target. I also didn’t measure the distance to the targets with a tape measure, I just paced out seven yards and shot from there. I also cheated a tiny bit in that these weren’t my first shots of the day - I hadn’t done a ton of warming up, but I think to be a better test of on-demand skill these should be the first shots fired of the day with no practice immediately before it. When I run this qual back later to track my progress, I’ll make it the first thing I do at the range before getting into some drills. Finally, my setup for running this was my carry gun (CZ P09C Nocturne with a Holosun EPS red dot) in an appendix holster with a spare magazine in a kydex mag carrier at my 11 o’clock (which I never carry, but more on that later). Both were clipped on to my belt, and I wore my usual outfit of a t-shirt and pants. Anyway, let’s just get into how things went.
The targets more or less speak for themselves. Nothing outside the center box on the left target, one just outside the center box but still on the silhouette on the right target, and one that’s really borderline on the center target. The paper tears broke the line, but I don’t think the bullet itself did, and since there’s any doubt I’m erring on the side of calling it outside the box. Score-wise, I’m quite happy with this. Unfortunately, it was my times, not my score, that lead to me failing this test. Let’s go through stage by stage.
Stage one has a combined par time of 3.30 seconds for the two strings of fire, and I came in at 3.40, one lousy tenth of a second slower than I needed to be. This stage is shot from concealment, and while I’m reasonably happy with my ability to draw from concealment, this makes it clear that I need to practice that skill somewhat and get those average times down. Not much more to say here other than “Dammit, I was close”. Could I have gotten lucky and passed this? Sure, but I didn’t. If I want to be able to reliably pass this test on demand, I’m gonna have to get my average draw time down a bit, and I do have a little wiggle room with my shot placement - I could definitely break that shot a little faster with a little less time overconfirming my sight picture. It’s nice to know what I need to practice!
Stage two went quite well. I put up respectable enough times for both strings of fire and kept all four rounds in the center box. I don’t go out of my way to practice double taps/bill drills/other “put multiple shots on the same target quickly” enough, but my recoil control and trigger control at speed are at a decent enough place to stack a few rounds close together relatively quickly. Definitely still something worth practicing, but not my biggest issue at this point.
Stage three was pretty much the same. Ride the recoil, keep pulling the trigger every time the red dot has reappeared over the target. Not too shabby, could be faster.
Stage four was the only other stage I failed, and this time by 0.06 seconds. Come on, man. So close. Honestly, I’m surprised I was able to get so near the par time, mostly because I never practice reloading from concealment. Maybe I’m just asking to get Kilt In The Streets, but I am not in the habit of carrying a spare magazine with a concealed holster. I practice reloads from a belt and chest rig a little bit, and if I ever reload in a competition that’s where the mags are coming from, but I just don’t ever have to deal with clearing a concealment garment in order to grab a magazine. Being able to fish the mag out from under my shirt with one hand is something I realistically should be practicing some more, and it’s worth evaluating if I should make a habit of carrying a spare mag, but those are thoughts for another day. For now, I can just say that I was damn close to passing this stage and with some practice I think I’ll be able to smoke it soon enough.
Stage five was easy, mostly because I do a lot of quick transitions between small-ish targets firing one shot on each at our local outlaw steel match. Really not too hard to come up from low ready and get each of the side targets once.
Stage six was honestly just fun. Spin 180 degrees and shoot all three targets from concealment? Yes please. Also, we just did a stage very similar to this at the aforementioned outlaw steel match this week, so I recently had a chance to play around with pivoting into a draw. I think this is the stage where I threw the one round on the right target out of the center box, just stepping on the gas pedal to see how fast I could make this one happen. Turns out, pretty respectably fast, coming in nearly two seconds before par.
Finally, stage seven. Again, having to reload from concealment is not my thing, but we made it work. Definitely something worth playing around with in practice to speed up a little bit more, though. Additionally, none of the matches I shoot really force you to step/duck into cover to reload - is this an important skill for someone like me? Probably not, no. Is it a fun thing to practice? Turns out, yeah, it kinda is.
Anyway, that’s about it for my breakdown of how my first attempt at the air marshal qualification test went. I will certainly be shooting this one some more after practicing individual skills in both dry and live fire - I think being able to pass this test on command is a very respectable measure of pistol abilities. There’s definitely some skills it doesn’t measure at all, and I think there’s some tweaks I would make if I were using this to evaluate a student in a class, as well as some different tweaks for using this as a self-assessment. One thing that comes immediately to mind is making the scoring a little bit less forgiving - five points for hits in the box, zero points for hits in the silhouette, and an immediate failure if a round misses the silhouette entirely. I’m a big fan of drills/tests that really stress being accountable for every round fired - sure, it’s fun to do some drag racing and see just how low you can get your splits hosing at cardboard, but if you’re practicing real world defensive skills I don’t think it’s too controversial to say that you need to be really damn sure that every round you fire will come to rest where you need it to. Anyway, I digress. I’ll write up some more thoughts on what makes for good drills and good tests later. In the meantime: this is definitely going up there with dot torture and the no-fail pistol drill as a great way to really stress test some pistol skills and I’ll be working a rotation of these in as the first shots I fire at the range on upcoming trips. I intend to post an update the next time I run this test and we’ll see if/when I’m finally qualified to fly.