On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Jon Wright wrote: > On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Gerard M Foley wrote: > > > I have seen no discussion of the wisdom of the decision to ban air traffic > > over the U.S. for a protracted period following the attacks of 9/11. > > In my opinion, shutting everything down on 9/11 was absolutely correct. > Keeping everything grounded for the rest of the week was stupid. > > I honestly believe that all the "enhanced" passenger screening, additional > restrictions on what may be brought on board, and "random" searches have > done nothing to improve security. Planes are just as safe today as they > would have been on 9/12/01 because passengers will rise up against > would-be hijackers and no pilot will ever open the cockpit door for a > hijacker again. The 9/11 gang exploited a weakness in the regimen > for dealing with air pirates. That weakness has been closed--not by > any new TSA policy but by the philosophy of the traveling public and > flight crews--so nobody is going to try that again. Any Bad Guys are > going to find a new weakness to exploit; that is where prevention ought > to be focused. Since the shutdown the week of 9/11/01 seemed to be spent > exclusively coming up with new passenger screening techniques (closing > the barn down after the horses were already gone), I see no benefit > to having left the traveling public stranded for several days while > the air system was shutdown. > > Respectfully, > Jon > Spot on. Once people understood the threat of hijackers using the plane as a missle, the approach became useless. The only thing we've done since then, against that, that really counts, is reinforcing cockpit doors, since that gives the pilots a much better lines of defense against someone getting into the cockpit in the first place. Just knowing it isn't safe to cooperate is the big thing. As a follow-up, securing the system against other mechanisms of attack (Explosives, in particular) makes a lot of sense. But... the whole "nailclipper fetish" struck me as fairly inane, and is finally, slowly, getting recognized as such. A clever person, would move onto other ways of interfering with the aviation system, especially after we showed them just how disruptive a shutdown was. I don't think we've really figured out how to think "outside the box" on this stuff, and that's problematic. Asymetric threats are really hard to deal with because they just skip past the stuff you've defended against and come at you from another angle. - David