. >> todd sperry with cnn. give me a brief history lesson on what happened on what you call the experiment and why the guns were removed and what exactly led up to that. i just want to understand it better from your perspective. >> several things. airline pilots were armed from the dawn of commercial aviation through 1987, through the mid-60s airline pilots were required to carry firearms when they had u.s. mail onboard which is a large number of flights. so it was actually a requirement that existed in place for airline pilots to carry the guns. in 1987, late 1986, there was a cockpit takeover that people don't know and don't remember. where a guy broke into the cockpit of a pacific southwest airlines, bae-146, not that you care but it's an airline wer 100 people on it. he had a gun, he shot the pilots and killed them and crashed the airline and everyone died. so we had a situation here where we had an unarmed cockpit and the result was the loss of an airplane and all of the passengers. the response, the faa r