Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company, taking a look at a revolver that is
going to be in their upcoming April of 2020 Premier Auction.
This is sort of an experimental Colt revolver that was
commissioned by Eastern Airlines in the early 1970s.
Now, this is a period in time when there was a serious
rash of airline hijackings. Like in 1972 Eastern Airlines
had ... like more than two dozen flights hijacked.
This was a problem, and they had to do something about it.
And Eastern Airlines had a security director that they brought on, by the name of Jonathan Edward Shields,
who was not a big fan of the Federal Sky Marshal program.
The Sky Marshals had been around since the 1960s,
and what he didn't like, basically, was the notion that Eastern Airlines should outsource its security
to someone else in the plane, and also give up a seat on the aircraft.
You know, they can't charge a ticket to the Federal government for a Sky Marshal who's on board.
... Well, what he really preferred, he apparently wanted a lot more security at passenger screening,
before people got on the airplanes, but that wouldn't happen for another 30 years.
Instead, his backup idea was, "Well, if there's going to be someone armed on the plane, let's make it our guy."
And so his idea was to arm the pilot and co-pilot.
However, there was a concern about, "What if a bullet punctures the skin of the aircraft?"
Now, I think there's a great MythBusters episode that talks about what actually happens if that happens.
And the answer is, well, not really a whole lot.
It's not actually the sort of catastrophic hazard to the plane that people think it is.
However, there is a valid concern for over-penetration.
Airline flights are very, very, target dense environments.
And ... you don't want to miss and hit a passenger.
If you do shoot a hijacker, you don't want the bullet to go through them and then hit someone behind them.
And so what Colt did was develop a specialised sort of projectile and revolver just for Eastern Airlines.
Let's take a look at it.
These guns are fundamentally Colt Lawman revolvers.
They used both Mark IIIs and Mark Vs for this project, this particular one is a Mark V.
This was developed by a company called Colt Technik, which was a subsidiary of Colt in Jericho, New York.
We still have the original markings on the barrel that say Lawman Mark V,
and say that it's .357 Magnum cartridge, which it is definitely not.
Because the development involved primarily changing what these guns actually fired.
So, what we have here is a Zytel or plastic cylinder that has 6 steel sleeves embedded in it.
This is a single-use cylinder, so once you shoot all 6 rounds
you take this out, throw it away, and put in a new one.
And the projectiles themselves were actually made out of Plaster of Paris,
which seems very fragile, and well that was kind of the point.
It was brittle enough to disintegrate on impact with basically anything.
It was allegedly found to be sufficiently powerful to incapacitate a hijacker,
but it wouldn't go through the skin or the window of an aircraft.
Now there are a couple of problems that come up using a Plaster of Paris projectile.
One of them is humidity. If that thing gets wet, that will be a problem, if it absorbs water out of the atmosphere.
So these chambers were originally sealed at the front to prevent moisture from getting in.
The other problem was brittleness.
So, those projectiles were brittle enough that if you fired one down a rifled barrel, it would just disintegrate.
So the barrels are the same, the barrels are still rifled, but the projectiles were housed inside plastic sabots
so that they didn't actually have to be pressed into the rifling.
So the ... projectile would still be spinning when it exited the bore,
it would then shed that plastic sabot and disintegrate when it hit whatever it ended up hitting.
Apparently the original plan also was to have these guns,
like when the pilot and co-pilot weren't actively flying the aircraft,
they would split the gun up, and one of them would keep the cylinder and one would keep the frame.
The idea being to prevent the inevitable situation of, "Oops, I left a loaded gun in the hotel room."
Or, probably from Eastern Airline's perspective, "What if one of our pilots gets into some domestic disturbance,
and shoots someone, illegally, with their airline issued revolver?
... That would be bad, we don't want that to happen."
So one of them keeps the cylinder, one keeps the gun.
When they get into the plane they assemble the thing together, stick it in a little safe in the cockpit,
and, hopefully, leave it there and never need it.
I should also point out, there's no ejector rod on this because there's no ejector star on the cylinder,
because there's nothing to eject. These chambers are integral to the cylinder.
The one conundrum here that I ran into looking at this is,
you can't actually take the cylinder out, because it hits the stop right there.
Now, we did a little bit of experimentation with this.
If you take the cylinder crane off the cylinder does come off very easily. ...
That little stop is the only thing holding it in.
... First off, if you line it up with these scallops you can get it to slide back that far.
And if you took this and gave it a good yank, you would scratch up the cylinder,
but you wouldn't damage the gun and it would come out.
And the same thing applies for putting it back in, you can line it up,
get it started on the rod, and if you give it a good push, it'll pop over that stop.
So I suspect, given that these were only ever done developmentally,
that's probably how they planned on it being used had they actually gone into serious production
(I'm kinda spoilering the end of this video),
but had they gone into serious production, I expect they would have come up with a solution to this.
And it would be as easy extending a groove the length of the cylinder
to allow it to bypass that stop.
But that is Colt's Eastern Airlines anti-hijacking revolver.
Ultimately, these were never put into mass production.
Colt made a small number of them for trials, and to show to Eastern, and to get the concept worked out.
But ultimately the airline was convinced to accept the Sky Marshal program instead of arming their own pilots.
And so, the few of these that existed were sold off relatively cheap.
In fact I've seen a copy of the ad, they were $9.95 when originally sold off.
Came with a fired cylinder like this one.
And they are a really cool, I think, a cool example of one of Colt's experimental designs.
So, if you're interested in this one, of course it is coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
You can check out their pictures and description in their catalogue.
As well as everything else that's for sale in this auction.
Thanks for watching.
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