This Guardian article, refererenced from Merde in France, reveals that the French have been hiring some rather, uh, unqualified characters to work as air marshalls:

The company put in charge of security for Air France flights employed a convicted murderer and a number of others with serious criminal records, it emerged yesterday.

The background of the guards was disclosed in a Paris court during a hearing to wind up the company, Pretory, which had been operating security on the French airline for more than two years but went into bankruptcy after tax fraud allegations.

The revelation of its lax recruiting methods coincided with the disclosure that armed French police have been flying with Air France to the US since December 23.

The government ordered the use of the gendarmerie after the US said that flights without armed escorts would be banned from overflying or landing, because of the fear of terrorism.

Last week Air France cancelled six transatlantic crossings at short notice after Washington said terrorists might be on board.

The airline refused to make any comment on a possible link with the use of a dodgy private company.

Four days after the terror attacks in the US on September 11 2001 Air France was one of the first networks to announce that passengers would be accompanied by "specially trained agents".

But the tribunal which ordered the company's liquidation heard that, in a rush to recruit guards, it had taken on disco bouncers, dog handlers, nightwatchmen, and other staff with little or no experience of arms or safety procedures.

At one time 200 guards were employed on flights.

An investigation was eventually started last April, when the police looked into the background of 140 agents, the most qualified of whom were former soldiers.

As a result of a search of criminal records more than 30 agents were grounded as a potential security risk.

The police also looked into the record of Pretory's sub-contractors.

This led to unconfirmed reports that some guards had been sent for arms training courses in Middle Eastern countries suspected of harbouring terrorists.

You might think this mess was produced and facilitated by a private company. You would be wrong: like many French companies, Air France is actually majority-owned by the French government.

Going further, this article (in French: translated) alleges that many of the Pretory agents cannot speak English, and others have not even mastered French, and details some "curious transactions" in which Pretory received 400,000 euros for purposes unknown, and also apparently bribed Joel Cathala, police chief and current safety director of Air France, to the tune of 50,000 francs in 1998.

Here in the US, some people have an issue with pilots or off-duty police officers carrying weapons on airplanes. Private citizen doing something: bad; Government doing something: good.

But it's clear that pilots, or random off-duty police officers with some training would be a much better choice than some of these characters allowed to perform this role by Air France, essentially part of the French government.