Mr. MelancholyMutt, next time, don't wear the safety pin through your nose like that and maybe they won't notice it.
Mr. Spudley112 comes close... The events of Setp 11, 2001 were incredible. Four or five men armed with nothing more than box cutter knives, "knives" -- if you can call them that -- with no more than an inch of edge, managed to hijack commercial aircraft. I don't think you could rob my local grocery store with a box cutter. How did they manage to gain control of these aircraft?
The answer is that, at the time, it was airline policy to capitulate to hijackers. This policy was based on the premiss that the hijackers wanted to survive. If we just cooperated, we would all survive with them. We might get a complementary trip to Cuba or something, but if the hijackers would live through it, then we all would. That was the unwritten social contract that governed aircraft hijacking.
On the morning of Sept. 11, those men boarded those aircraft in violation of that contract. They didn't expect to or even want to survive. With the premiss broken, the capitualate policy failed horribly.
But, on one of those aircraft, the passengers decided to re-write the unwritten social contract, and that re-write is permanent. Airlines have changed their official policies and passengers have changed their personal policies too.
How did the hijackers get into the cockpits of those aircraft? Experts believe they were invited in before the planes even took off. One hijacker on each team was a licenses commercial pilot. To keep such a license, you have to log a certain number of hours in the cockpit each year. Just sitting in the jump seat can count for some of those hours. So, it was a common practice for airline pilots to allow other pilots to ride in the jump seat to log their hours. Not any more!
There's a bit discussion right now about arming pilots. But all of the planes involved on Sept. 11 were Boeing jumbo jets. That means the pilots were already armed. The FAA requires that cockpits have a "secondary means of egress." Most aircraft designers satisfy this by making the large front windows openable. But Boeing refuses because they think it's unnecessary since no pilot has ever successfully egressed via such windows following a crash and because it compromises the structural integrity of the aircraft. The compromise that allows the FAA to have its secondary egress and Boeing to build the planes its way is that all Boeing jumbos are equipped with an ax. The ax is mounted on the wall in the cockpit. Federal law prohibits one of these planes from taking off without the ax. It's on the pre-flight checklist. Trapped pilots can use that ax to smash the cockpit windows and egress through them. In my book, an ax usually beats a box-cutter knife.
Recently, a mad man did try to break into the cockpit of an aircraft. He actually managed to break part of the door and get about half-way in before one of the pilots beaned him on the head with the Boeing Ax.
Had this happened a few years ago, the ax-weilding pilot would doubtlessly have faced disciplinary action from the airline upto and including termination for having abused the poor passenger, criminal charges including assult with a deadly weapon and maybe even attempted murder, and then the passenger would have sued him for injuries and also for pain, suffering, and a lifetime of mental trauma.
But, in the post-Sept 11th environment, on-board Air Marshalls arrested the man who is now the one facing serious criminal charges and the pilot is a hero.
It is unfortunate that it took the events of Sept. 11th to make that change in attitude.
But there has been a change in attitude. Because of the new attitude, the events of Sept. 11 are simply not possible anymore. Never again will five men with box cutter knives be able to defeat a hundred passengers, five cabin crew, and two pilots armed only with magazines, blankets, pillows, food trays, and one ax.
That change did NOT come from new technologies, from expensive luggage scanners, from strict security screenings, or from stun guns or even real guns. The technology was never lacking. The deficiency on Sept. 11 was not in technology or even procedures at the security checkpoint or in the cockpit. The deficiencies that made the events of Sept. 11 possible, the deficiencies that those terrorists expertly utilized, were in our attitudes.
(No, I'm not telling, be creative folks)
