Comments on: Knives on the Plane

By: Bo Henriksson

Bo Henriksson — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:28:10 +0000

An organized and dedicated group of terrorists WILL bring an airplane down given enough time and resources. That’s just a simple matter of statistics.
They only have to get it right once.
We have to get it right every time!
99.999 % of flight crew will go through their career without suffering a terrorist event. However, dealing with disturbed and mentally unstable passengers is fairly common. I think it would be common sense that you minimize access to anything that could be used as a weapon such as knives. Although the cockpit won’t be breached the lives of passengers and flight attendants could be at stake.

TSA is an embarrassment to this country.

By: Norman

Norman — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:16:59 +0000

Good point you make about balance and consistency Rob. The people who generate the lists and policy’s are the ones to swing from a lamp-post, the TSA guys are just doing their job (in relation to what is and is not allowed to be carried and how) and will lose it if they use their common sense, discretion or pragmatism.

We (in the UK) can’t take (flight crew) family on the flight deck even though they present no risk whatever – you might argue that there are then more people to lrave for a pee and such like but… sigh! – when does the stupidity stop?

By: Zach Sielaff

Zach Sielaff — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:47:36 +0000

The worst part about the whole liquid ban thing is, to me, that they did it based off of the wrong incident. The whole “binary explosive” nonsense in the UK seemed to be more of a fantasy than a reality, while Ramzi Yousef (the man who bombed the WTC in 1993) actually did detonate a liquid bomb on board a Phillippine Air 747, and the only reason it wasn’t destroyed was because the center fuel tank happened to be one row aft of where he thought it would be. That incident occurred in 1994, and utilized a bottle of contact lens solution to conceal the explosive, bottles which are still allowed to this day regardless of their size. Based on everything I’ve seen, TSA serves no purpose other than to make things look secure, whether they’re actually secure or not.

By: Jeff Reich

Jeff Reich — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:45:32 +0000

The TSA and IRS seem more useless to me. I can’t help to think the U.S. would be money ahead with a flat tax and dropping federal security measures for airlines. You may recall the email that was circulating soon after 9/11; it was supposed to have been written by a cargo airline pilot who had been a police officer. The pilot’s message was to drop security measures all together. He then suggested that you imagine a suspicious person moving toward the cockpit door and the subsequent clicking and snapping of weapons as they were being cocked by the armed passengers. His argument was that the threat of armed passengers would be the best deterrent.
His idea may have been extreme, but imagine if the only security was that driven by the competition for airline customers. Ideally the security measures that would culminate would be those which were necessary to draw passengers trusting of that airline. Granted this would likely also be met with some poor security – would it be worse than what we have?

By: Jess Sightler

Jess Sightler — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:08:22 +0000

Knives on an airplane are reasonable. We can’t keep knives (shivs) out of prisons, and it is unreasonable to expect that we will be able to on an aircraft. Aircraft security must be based upon the presumption that knives will be readily available to an attacker.

Wireless internet is irrelevant. Unless you think they should actively jam communications (probably impractical anyway for a host of reasons), the attackers would simply use mesh networking instead of internet based coordination. It’d probably be more reliable anyway.

None of this is a defense of the TSA, though. They have considered the possibility of people combining their less than three ounce tubes, and supposedly have plans to deal with that. These plans are obviously secret (ie, flawed).