Unsecure Skies

By: Clay W. Biles

Narrated by: Arcady Shteynberg

The author gives us an unfiltered account of his personal experience as a Federal Air Marshal. The listener will see how a bureaucracy chartered to protect the flying public frustrates the best recruits by discouraging efforts to excel in physical training and marksmanship. Rigid bureaucratic dress codes and less-than-secure behavior by some managers risk identifying Air Marshals to terrorists. And even worse, some local supervisors abuse the benefits of their positions to make personal flights on the public's dime or engage in office romances with subordinates or steal government property.

This book shows us the process by which recruits are taught to stifle dissent and learn to just go along. The author eventually finds it impossible to tolerate these abuses. Someone has to do something about it. But can the Federal Air Marshal Service accept criticism from within? Will a whistleblower be successful?

©2014 Clay W. Biles (P)2016 Clay W. Biles

Pointless and frustrating

This is a revenge story written by a disgruntled employee. Nothing more. It drags on and on and describes in painful detail situations that are not interesting and completely inessential to the sorry. The author decided to spend an entire chapter going on about a routine flight to London where he describes every minute of that flight, yet nothing happens. Basically, if you have ever flown anywhere internationally - you can skip that charter completely. This book does not really give you any insight into the actual FAM training or strategies they use. Then these is an annoying inconsistency with the author’s morals and principles: he keeps preaching the entire book that one should never ever ever be a “rat”, yet becomes a “rat” at a slightest pressure at the end. Finally, what’s the point of this story - That any office has its own inter-employee politics? Yeah, we know that. Anything else? Were there some interesting investigations or missions or incidents during your time at FAMS? No? Then why did you write that book? Just as a revenge to your boss? Yeah, but the real revenge was on the reader - that’s ten hours of my life I won’t get back!

boring and relatively pointless story

I thought this book would be about airline security. instead it was about the career of some random guy and the politics involved in working for a government bureaucracy. there were some good parts, some interesting topics but overall it was pretty boring and pointless.