For the want of a knife

[Gollnick]

Yesterday, Asiana Airlines flight 214, a Boeing 777 with 307 passengers and crew aboard arriving in San Francisco from Seoul crash-landed. Here is how Associates Press described the scene (boldfacing mine):

The Boeing 777 slammed into the runway on Saturday morning, breaking off its tail and catching fire before slumping to a stop that allowed the lucky ones to flee down emergency slides into thick smoke and a trail of debris. Firefighters doused the flames that burned through the fuselage with foam and water, and police officers on the ground threw utility knives up to crew members so they could cut the seat belts of those who remained trapped as rescue crews removed the injured.

Just a few months ago, the US TSA announced that it was going to reverse a rule it threw into place amidst the panic following the 9/11/2001 hijacking and attacks prohibiting all knives carried aboard by passengers. At the time, this rule -- as just about all of TSA's -- was quickly copied by most countries of the world since none wanted to be branded by the US as having sub-standard passenger air security. TSA finally realized that small knives are not a problem and that searching for them was a waste of their time and energy. The TSA had to do an about-face under public pressure. Among other groups, airline flight attendants protested that it was unsafe and unnecessary to have even small knives aboard. "Why," they asked, "would anyone ever need a pocket knife in-flight?"

Yesterday, they got their answer. Yesterday, people may very well have died for lack of pocket knives among the passengers of Flight 214. Hopefully, the TSA can use this incident to renew its efforts to drop this silly rule.

 

[Dan57]

Whether a few of the passengers having small pocket or keychain knives could have changed things, is debatable. What's most surprising to me is that the flight attendants didn't already have some sort of strap cutter. Ensuring the safety of passengers is their primary duty! And, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but aren't strap cutters virtually ubiquitous tools among rescue personnel? Even if something like a Spyderco Assist or Victorinox RescueTool isn't an option, why don't they have shears or rescue hooks?

Of course, the above assumes that they didn't already have such an item. It's possible that they had rescue knives or strap cutters stored in some part of the plane that became inaccessible to them. It's also possible that we're just going to make fools out of ourselves by generating a bunch of speculation based only on one half of one sentence, from one article, that may later turn out to be distorted or incorrect. I don't think we know enough yet.

 

[Dan57]

Something I just realized: Shears, I'm assuming, would fall under the same category as scissors, which are allowed under the TSA's regs. (Within a certain size range, which most shears fall within.)
I'm not sure about rescue hooks, but I've heard that you can get them through, sometimes.

Both of the above are better options for seatbelt cutting than the small, non-locking, one hand opening knives the TSA briefly considered allowing back on planes.

 

[yablanowitz]

Shears or rescue hooks may be better choices than small pocket knives, but a small sharp knife beats fingernails and teeth by a country mile.

 

[Bufford]

Restrictive laws such as these, rarely ever change unless people have to die and it can be proven that the law was unusual harsh, and restrictive in a way that could cause loss of life. The question that comes to mind is how many more crashes and deaths will it take to convince the TSA and the nanny state to make the needed changes? Now would be a good time to weigh in and demand changes to these excessive laws.

 

[Bufford]

For whatever its worth I fired this off to the TSA folks

The recent crash of a Boeing 777 in San Francisco in which fire fighters and crew had to ask police to provide them with knives to cut free stranded passengers in the burning wreckage, is proof that changes need to be made to security screening laws to allow passengers to carry small knives onto the plane. This accident again like many others has left helpless passengers without any means to cut themselves free when accidents happen, and they do with glaring regularity as statistics will prove. Air passengers deserve better laws than the narrow minded, punitive zero tolerance of knives inside the cabin we have now. More effort should be diverted to flammable and explosive devices, than for simple edged tools like knives, which is draining the resources of security screeners. It's time for change here and globally before more people have to die than otherwise would, if they had the small knives to cut themselves free from disaster however remote these may be.