This is a hypothetical! I’m curious about the legality of this.
Suppose I have a pilot’s license and am authorized to possess firearms in whatever jurisdictions I am interested in flying over. Can I legally mount my street-legal firearms on my plane and turn it into a fighter plane? Yes, I know it would be a pretty crappy and ineffective fighter, especially in the hands of someone without military flight training, but would doing so necessarily constitute an offense? If so, what law would be being broken?
Assume that I have a valid pilot’s license for whatever kind of plane I have. Also assume that I am legally allowed to possess and use whatever guns I have, either because I have the necessary carry permits or because I am in a jurisdiction that does not require an explicit permit for someone not specifically disqualified (e.g. by being convicted of a felony). Also assume I own the plane free and clear and will be flying it myself, so any legal requirement to obtain the owner’s permission or the captain’s permission to “carry” on a flight will be satisfied, as I will be both the owner and the captain. Also assume that I do not intend to use my fighter plane to commit a crime such as assault or murder.
Would adding a rack of AR-15’s to my plane constitute an unlawful modification of an aircraft that would void my authority to fly it? Is there a separate offense of carrying a firearm in flight? Are there mag size limits that apply in the air that wouldn’t apply, say, when hunting in the woods? Of course, intentionally strafing someone from the air would be Assault with a Deadly Weapon and/or Attempted Murder, but we aren’t talking about that.
No specific jurisdiction is indicated - I’m curious as to whether any jurisdiction has a law about this.
I would think that flying around with a rack of loaded and armed firearms mounted would, at the least, run afoul of the “No dangerous cargo” provision, causing you to need to re-register it under some variant of the Experimental Category.
Which means getting an FAA inspector to sign off on it.
Good luck with that.
Never mind what would happen if you actually tried to fire them in US (or any other self-respecting country) airspace.
Well, the guns are not mounted on the airplane but the pilot or the passenger can shoot out of an airplane at wild pigs, coyotes, etc… Folks do it all the time.
If they are permanently mounted they require paper work. :mad:
If just Duct taped to a strut and using a pull string to fire at wild pigs or coyotes being the new “Hold my beer and see if you can shoot with your plane this good?” Not really a problem IMO. :dubious:
Can use helicopters, ultra lights, hand guns but that is some difficult shooting, :dubious: and …
If you make or use real machine guns ( ratat tat tat tat ) then you need to be real afraid of the ATF … IMO :eek:
FAA – if my information is right from some filmmakers I know, even blank guns are tough if mounted on the aircraft itself. Maybe a WW I repro but I would give up thinking something like a Mustang or Tomahawk.
Although we did have a guy prosecuted in PA for shooting a deer from an ultralight, I believe there are places where you can legally hunt boar as a “door gunner” from a helicopter.
I tried to find something in the regs. Being lazy, I just found this post on a message board:
Assuming this guy’s research is correct, you would need a type certificate to modify a certified airplane. What if you have a homebuilt? Obviously, that would be in the Experimental category. I suspect that if the FAA gave approval for the mounting of weapons (after all, companies do it all the time), they would require it to be registered in the url=“https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/airworthiness_certification/sp_awcert/restrict/”]Restricted category.
Operation of restricted category aircraft is limited to special purposes identified in the applicable type design.
This means that you can’t just use your plane as your daily commuter aircraft or to take a trip to Las Vegas. Assuming you were able to get a Restricted certificate, you would be able to fly it within a certain area for specific legal purposes.
I think the BATFE would be the larger problem; not to mention state and local authorities. The OP says he is ‘authorized to possess firearms in whatever jurisdictions I am interested in flying over’, but jurisdictions he’s interested in flying over (such as the State of California) might disagree.
Given that, as far as I know, no where in the 50 states can even police fire their weapons from police helicopters regardless of the circumstances, I would highly doubt it.
It isn’t a function of type certificates. If you look at virtually every war bird it has “Experimental” written on it.
I don’t have the article handy but there was a war bird owner that wanted a higher level of authenticity and he had to jump through hoops just to get a deactivated gun installed. A WW-II airplane is still a serious problem with a rack of machine guns attached.
If your name was Lockheed (or even Boeing), it would be at least possible.
Johnny - thanks for the correction. I was thinking that all off-the-wall birds fell into Experimental.
Here’s one for the bragging rights:
At what point in the flight testing/acceptance testing may an aircraft operate it’s weapons.
I’m going to go way out and speculate that live fire is almost never done. Blank cannon rounds and dummy bombs are easy - but the missiles can’t be so easily faked - is there some alternative to firing a real missile (with no explosive/whatever on it). Can you simulate the track-to-target capability without a real missile?
Odd question but ----- has anyone tried to contact the “Confederate Air Force” and see if any of their members have working guns? I know there could be a difference between a restored original and new construction but with all the left-over aircraft sold after “Tora, Tors, Tora” was released and more, they could have some good info on the subject.
I don’t know about the CAF, but I’ve know from visits to the Littlefield Tank Collection that they had to jump through a lot of bureaucratic hoops to de-weaponize any military vehicles when they acquired them.
For live fire testing, we take the aircraft out by Yuma and shoot. Real live ammo and missiles. Not every production aircraft, but initial design and significant changes have to be tested. Production aircraft just get tests of ammo handling with dummy rounds.
Would you buy a military aircraft where the guns have never been fired? Certifying that the vibration from the gun doesn’t cause problems with the other systems is important. Finding out if the missile exhaust damages the fuselage (or starts a fire in the fuel tanks!:eek:) is also important.
The planes here all have realistic but non-functioning guns. For example:
“A dummy fiberglass top and tail turret were installed, topping off the work with a pair of simulated .50 caliber machine guns for the chin and tail turrets.”
Since they sell rides, it just wouldn’t do to have the slightest possibility of some paying customer shooting down another plane or strafing someone’s house.
When Airwolf (with it’s “totally realistic” telescoping barreled guns) was filming I remember reading that the heli couldn’t even fly over LA with the fake guns exposed. That always seemed to me to be a bit excessive, considering all the other movies that have large scale death and destruction in and around LA. Automatic weapons firing blanks downtown is cool, but wooden replicas on a heli is too big a risk?
The guy that taught me to fly, beginning when I was around 14yrs old, (a highly deco’d disciplinary-strong(!) F-4 and Huey-chopper combat Vet of 'Nam) was buddies with quite a few CAF’ers in Houston area. There were around 9-10 (forget exact numbers) or so Zeroes that would once or twice/year fly-in to the grass-field airport I flew from to visit/rest/tell war-stories of their x-country trips. VERY cool…even got to fly one of them shortly after winning a cocky bet, but that is off-topic and another story…
I did overhear several of them loudly bitchin’ about the paperwork/time it took to get them ‘certified’'. Some of them had realistic looking pseudo-guns/drop-tanks on them, while others were plated-over/removed to avoid the hassles, etc, IIRC.
The CAF’ers definitely had nothing nice to say about (re)certifying the warbird(s) once they bought them for restoration and personal use. Some stated they would never try to get a warbird again, fwiw. And I would bet things are even tighter restricted nowadays.
This P40 Kittyhawk has been fitted with operational guns that have been used to fire blanks at several airshows. I was working in Wanaka when this aircraft was first displayed and as I recall, the restoration had been rumoured to include operational guns, when I asked the owner whether that had happened he said that it did not currently have working guns and that the reason was he’d have to follow standard New Zealand gun laws which required, among other things, for the guns to be locked away in an approved gun safe separate from the ammunition when not in use. This was not impossible to do but impractical. I assume that since then they’ve found a way to comply with the rules, or maybe the guns are only capable of firing blanks, the link isn’t detailed.
Are hunters not allowed to fire from a helicopter in the US? In New Zealand wild deer were shot from helicopters until a live capture method was devised using a net gun. (Warning: cool video.)
