Guns on planes: What the rulebook says, and how it got written

Following a Varanasi airport incident, here’s how India and the US regulate legal firearm transport in checked baggage.

In Die Hard, John McClane steps off a red-eye to Los Angeles with his service Beretta tucked into his waistband. Nobody at the gate blinks. He then goes on, in his vest, to take down a skyscraper full of terrorists — and for nearly four decades, viewers have watched all of it without lingering on the airport paperwork. Neither in 1988 nor today would that walk off the jet bridge have been legal, on either side of the Pacific.

FILE - New York can continue to enforce laws banning firearms in sensitive locations, a federal appeals court ruled Friday, Dec. 8, 2023 in its first broad review of a host of new gun rules passed in the state after a landmark Supreme Court ruling last year.(AP Photo/Brittainy Newman, File) (AP)

The legality of carrying guns on commercial flights is back in the news after a passenger’s licensed pistol went off during a mandatory security check at Varanasi’s Lal Bahadur Shastri International Airport on Sunday, injuring two screeners when the round ricocheted. The passenger, Kamlesh Kedarnath Rai of Azamgarh, bound for Mumbai on Air India Express IX 1810, had done everything the rulebook asks of him. He declared his 7.62 mm pistol and 21 live cartridges at the check-in counter, and was escorted to the isolated bay where firearms are inspected before they are cleared for the hold. Something went wrong at that step. The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security has opened a formal inquiry into what.

There is a rulebook for this, and most of the time it works. Two things about it are worth unpacking. What the rulebook actually says a passenger and a screener are supposed to do when a firearm arrives at an Indian or American airport, and where it came from — because most of it was written in the aftermath of one bombing and two hijackings.

The rulebook: what the checks look like now

Indian aviation law starts, on this subject, with a sentence written in the last decade of British rule. Rule 8 of the Aircraft Rules 1937 provides that no person shall carry, or cause to be carried, in any aircraft to, from, within or over India, any arms or ammunition “except with the written permission of the Central Government and subject to the terms and conditions of such permission.” Sub-rule (2) lays a duty of care on the pilot, the consignor, and every person handling the goods.

Everything else — the declaration at check-in, the packing, the separation of cartridges from the weapon, the isolated bay at the airport — is the shape that written permission and those terms and conditions have taken in the nine decades since. The current operational text is BCAS AVSEC Order 11/2024, which governs passenger carriage; a companion order, 03/2022, covers weapons carried by personal security officers assigned to VVIPs and VIPs. The Arms Act 1959 and the Arms Rules 2016 sit alongside, governing the licence itself and the quantum of ammunition endorsed on it. Penalty flows from the Aircraft Act 1934. In Indian law, carriage of a licensed weapon on a commercial flight is a permission — one the state grants case by case, on procedural conditions.

Those conditions play out, in practice, as a seven-step choreography. The passenger is expected to give the airline advance notice, and to declare the weapon and ammunition at check-in along with the original arms licence. The airline verifies the endorsement against identification and hands the passenger over to a screener, who escorts him — with the weapon and ammunition — to a bay set apart from the general X-ray belt. There, the weapon is rendered safe: chamber open, magazine out, no round anywhere it can travel. It is then locked into a hard-sided container.

The ammunition, packed separately in original manufacturer boxes or an approved metal or fibre box, cannot exceed 5 kg gross under the airline-level cap tied to the licence endorsement. Air India permits one licensed revolver, pistol or shotgun and up to fifty cartridges per passenger, at a handling charge of ₹5,000 plus GST on domestic sectors. Both weapon and ammunition then travel in an inaccessible cargo hold. The passenger collects them at destination against a receipt and photo identification.

The screeners running that check at most Airports Authority of India-managed airports — Varanasi among them — are employees of AAICLAS, the AAI’s cargo-logistics arm. They hold BCAS certifications renewed every two years, and rotate off the X-ray console every twenty minutes under fatigue-mitigation rules. Around them stands the Central Industrial Security Force, providing armed presence and access control without touching the physical inspection. BCAS sits over both, writing the standards and auditing the compliance.

For all the daylight between Indian and American gun culture on the ground, the two rulebooks in the air look remarkably alike. Under 49 CFR § 1540.111, a firearm may not travel in the cabin or on a passenger’s person in a sterile area, ever, regardless of state concealed-carry or open-carry laws.

It is permitted in checked baggage only if the passenger declares it to the airline before checking, only if it is unloaded, only if it is packed in a hard-sided container, and only if that container is locked with the passenger alone holding the key or combination. Ammunition is capped by hazmat rule at 11 lb — roughly 5 kg, close to the Indian limit. The criminal statute behind the regulation, 49 USC § 46505, carries a penalty of up to ten years’ imprisonment.

Whether Americans read that rulebook is a separate question. In 2024, officers of the Transportation Security Administration intercepted 6,678 firearms at security checkpoints across 277 US airports. About 94% of them were loaded. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson alone contributed 440. TSA administrators have publicly linked the steady rise in checkpoint interceptions since 2008 to the spread of permitless-carry laws now on the books in roughly 29 states.

Courts have consistently ruled that Second Amendment protections stop at the sterile-area rope; inside the checkpoint, the cabin is federally regulated space, and constitutional carry stays on the concourse side. Passengers caught with an undeclared firearm face civil penalties of up to $14,950 and lose TSA PreCheck for at least five years.

Where the rules came from

For most of the jet age, aviation security in India was thin. That changed on 10 September 1976, when six men hijacked an Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Mumbai shortly after takeoff and diverted it to Lahore. The crisis was resolved after Pakistani intervention, but it produced the Pande Committee, and in January 1978 the government set up the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security as a cell inside the Directorate General of Civil Aviation. Its brief was to coordinate, inspect, monitor and train personnel on security matters — the first serious aviation-security bureaucracy the country had.

Nine years later, the bureau got the wider mandate it still has, and it got it because of a bomb. On 23 June 1985, a device concealed in checked baggage detonated aboard Air India Flight 182 — the Kanishka — over the Atlantic near the Irish coast, killing all 329 people on board. The attack was traced to Sikh militants operating out of Canada, and until 9/11 it stood as the deadliest single act of aviation terror in history.

On 1 April 1987, the government reorganised BCAS as an independent department under the Ministry of Civil Aviation, headed by an Indian Police Service officer of Director General of Police rank. Nearly every protocol a passenger walks through at an Indian airport today — hold-baggage screening, isolated inspection bays, declared-weapon procedure — descends in a straight line from that reorganisation.

The third pivot came at the end of the century. Between 24 and 31 December 1999, five hijackers took Indian Airlines flight IC-814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar via Amritsar, Lahore and Dubai, ending an eight-day standoff with the release of three jailed militants including Masood Azhar. The response, in early 2000, was the Sky Marshal programme.

Armed, plainclothes officers drawn from the National Security Guard began travelling on selected international and sensitive domestic routes, with the cabin and cockpit crew briefed on their presence and no one else. Deployment was reportedly doubled in late 2024 amid a surge of bomb-threat hoaxes on Indian flights. Sky marshals are the one narrow exception to the no-weapons-in-the-cabin rule of Indian civil aviation.

The American timeline compresses to a single date. Before 11 September 2001, airport screening in the US was contracted out by the airlines to private firms under loose Federal Aviation Administration oversight. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act, signed weeks after the attacks, federalised the workforce and created the TSA.

The Federal Air Marshal Service, until then a small legacy unit, was scaled up into a thousands-strong armed cadre riding US carriers on a threat-driven roster. In 2002, the Arming Pilots Against Terrorism Act created the Federal Flight Deck Officer programme, allowing volunteer pilots — once trained and deputised by TSA — to carry on the flight deck to defend against unauthorised cockpit entry. That programme is the American analogue to India’s sky marshals, and the only other route by which a firearm may legally travel in the front half of an American commercial airliner.

What Varanasi has left open

The BCAS inquiry into Sunday’s discharge will turn on questions the ministry’s notification does not answer. The first is whether the pistol Rai handed over at the isolated bay had a chambered round, or a magazine still inserted with rounds in it.

Under the American definition in 49 CFR § 1540.5, either would count as loaded, and the expectation on the ground in India is no different: a passenger presenting a weapon for inspection is expected to know that it is empty and to demonstrate that it is. If Rai walked in with a live round in the pistol, the failure sits with him.

The second question runs the other way. If Rai had cleared the weapon and handed over an empty pistol, and the round came from a magazine reinserted or a chamber closed during the screener’s inspection, the failure sits with the training and the protocol — with AAICLAS and, upstream, with BCAS. The current AVSEC order is not a public text, which means the answer to a basic question — who, precisely, is supposed to lay hands on the weapon at which step — is itself something the inquiry will have to bring into daylight.

The third is the wider question those two carry with them: whether the piece of paper Rai handed over at check-in is the front end of a system that works, or the front end of one that only reads as if it does. That answer will not come this week.