Travelers flying on cheap airplane tickets and taking advantage of cheap travel in general can breathe a little easier now that President Obama has ordered more air marshals on US planes.
It is estimated that hundreds of additional marshals will be temporarily assigned from the Secret Service, US Customs and Border Protection and pulled from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The federal government is looking to add federal air marshals to high priority international flights with other law enforcement officials flying on domestic routes.
In 2008 CNN reported that less than 1% of the average daily US domestic and international commercial flights carried air marshals. There was not an air marshal on the Christmas inbound flight to Detroit where a terrorist attempted to detonate a bomb.
Existing number of air marshals is thought to number in the thousands, though specific numbers have never been released.