On the evening mission, he armed his plane with eight Le Prieur rockets on the outer struts, set to fire electrically.
12.41pm BST Armss plane': a Russian view Facebook Twitter Pinterest Here's Russia Today's take on the "arms plane" affair.
But the cost to commercial airlines to arm every plane with such countermeasures would be high, and possibly prohibitive given the struggle for profits since the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks.
The Soviet Union, more cannily, traded arms, planes, and tanks for Spain's sizable gold reserves, the transfer of which crashed the value of the peseta.
During the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, for example, grainy film shot from an AC-130 Spectre gunship, a plane armed with a large-calibre machine-gun and mounted cannon, periodically appeared on the internet.
So did aerial surveillance "platforms" like the Predator, a remotely piloted spy plane armed with Hellfire missiles that had been effective at identifying targets in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Pilots were kept in the air thanks to the bravery of ground crew, whose job it was to check, patch holes, refuel and re-arm the planes.
Officials issued an emergency order demanding that foreign carriers put armed marshals on planes, if necessary.
There will be more police officers in airports, the transport ministry says, but there are no plans to put armed marshals on planes, a move pilots generally oppose.
While Japan has held the islands for more than a century, China also claims title and has sent armed ships and planes from civilian maritime agencies to assert a presence around them.
