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If you were seated on the side with the sun coming in, a magnifying glass would make a very nice flame starter.

Or, a can of coke and a chocolate bar

Now I’m going to have to go try that and impress my friends.

It’s nice to be together again, guys.

In all the traveling I’ve done since 9/11 I’ve realized that the security is NOT designed to keep crazy folks from blowing up or hijacking airplanes.

The goal of the TSA is “look busy, the boss is coming!”

They make it so you can’t go behind security without a boarding pass…but I’ve printed boarding passes off Delta’s website using my home printer, and they let me right back. What’s to stop me from saving the HTML to disk, and modifying it to go back any-old-time I feel like it? (And I have a reason to do this, too…there are Nathan’s hotdogs back there! Not that’d I’d risk federal prison for a hotdog(well, never again!))

There’s really no way to stop a determined bad-guy from getting on a plane, and doing bad-guy things. So the second best security mission is to LOOK like they’re doing something.

It’s like…if you show up with cash and buy a 1 way ticket departing that day, they will screen you 10 ways from sunday. But, umm…If we learned anything from 9/11 shouldn’t it be the terrorists know how to PLAN? Why wouldn’t they just buy a round trip ticket, 3 months earlier, with a credit card? The policy doesn’t stop terrorists…it just “looks busy!”

I honestly don’t know of a way to protect our friendly skies without resorting to Israeli style security, including their ramapant profiling…but I’m not sure that’s the country I want to live in either.

I don’t know – I think the policy is to generate as many pissed-off passengers as possible, so if anyone tries anything the PASSENGERS will pound the would-be hijacker into paste before any air marshal can do anything.

It certainly has that result as far as I’m concerned.

J.

I honestly don’t know of a way to protect our friendly skies without resorting to Israeli style security

You’re forgetting the most important & effective resource on the plane – the passengers. The TSA have cut our balls off. Give me (and thousands of other regular business fliers) my knife back, to start with.

I’ve got a hundred more, if you’re interested. Nobody is, though.

Ringo: “It’s nice to be together again, guys.”

Ringo, you’re missing a moptop. Unless you consider “Reid” the Fifth Beatle.

Steve: “I honestly don’t know of a way to protect our friendly skies without resorting to Israeli style security, including their ramapant profiling”

That’s not exactly the kind of “security lifestyle” I want to live under either, Steve. But I tend to agree with Jerry, in that I stopped worrying about airline security some time ago.

Any future attempt at a hijacking will be met by a fury pent up nearly four years now, as teens, grandmothers and everyone in between will be trying to “pound the would-be hijacker into paste,” as Jerry suggests.

If I owned an airline, in the seat pocket in front of each passenger, next to the airsickness bag and the escape diagram, there’d be a diagram of a human with pressure points to strike, and suggestions for how to fight would-be hijackers. That’s the type of “airline security” I think people would understand and appreciate.

I remember thinking right after 9-11 that “at least we won’t have to deal with hijackings anymore” for exactly the reasons stated above.

1. If anybody tried to hijack a plane, everybody on board would reasonably assume that the hijackers intend to crash the plane into something and the passengers are likely to get killed if they do nothing.
2. The passengers of Flight 93 illustrated what rational people do in such a situation.
3. The chance of a successful hijacking immediately drops to zero. (as illustrated within an hour of the WTC attacks.)
4. Potential hijackers know this.
5. Hijack attempts drop to zero.

other notes:
– couldn’t resist the Ringo bit. (that was me.) Old pics of Ried back in the radio days do look a little like George.
– Wow, that John Kerry sure is a jerk.

What some people are forgetting is that the 9/11 hijackers didn’t bring anything “illegal” onto those fated planes. Likewise, the baggage screeners that day were doing their jobs and were not being careless. To have confronted those would-be hijackers at the gate would have been overstepping their bounds as baggage screeners.

I’ve heard reports of some airlines relaxing their rules concerning possible hazardous objects. For instance, a certain luxury line has replaced their plastic knives with the more popular stainless steel variety.

To comment on Steve’s post, I see no problem in profiling. If you think about it, we make a greater effort to check the carryon luggage than we do the actual passengers. Nail clippers don’t crash planes. People do.

Reid, if you owned an airline, I’d steal the pressure points guide and hang it on my wall. That’d be the coolest pamphlet EVER!

The problem is before 9/11, hijackers weren’t seen as folks looking to destroy the plane immediately. They were there to make political statements and garner support – and killing passengers and destroying the planes by crashing them into something large and valuable wouldn’t do anything good. The policy was to play nice with the hijacker, and you’d go home at the end of the day with an exciting story to tell your friends.

9/11 changed that paradigm.

Emcee Fleshy’s got it – the PASSENGERS won’t allow a hijacking at this point, whether the hijackers are brandishing box cutters or baseball bats. If you’re hijacked, it’s an automatic death sentence and your only hope of pardon is to take out the terrorist. (And if the hijacker happens to get a little bent or dead in the process, well, he knew the job was dangerous when he took it.)

Shortly after 9/11 my wife and I had to travel to New Orleans. I reviewed the weapons I could take on the plane legally – a box of Uniball Micro .2mm pens, a rather oddly scored 8×11 sheet of thin lexan, a heavy keyring, a sturdy belt pouch on a web belt w/3 rolls of quarters in it, and a 24” piece of 550 cord. (Parachute cord – the real stuff with the multiple inner nylon threads, not the fake with a single polyester cord running down the middle.) We were just a trifle paranoid, and were damn sure going to put up a fight if anything untoward happened.

And, of course, it didn’t. But luck favors the prepared. Thinking how we could fight back felt better than pretending we were sheep waiting for the slaughter and only protected by the good graces of the TSA.

J.

JL’s suggestion brought something to mind: Most flights have soft-drinks in those little 8oz cans. Most people wear socks.

Anybody remember the Sean Penn movie Bad Boys?

Yeah, it’s amazing the damage a pillowcase and a six pack of Coke can do.

You know, if we keep this up, TSA will ban soft drinks on flights, especially in combination with chocolate bars.

No, they’ll just ban socks. And shirts. And pants. And underwear. And shoes. And briefcases, baby seats, all carryon luggage…

We’ll have to fly NEKKID!

Frankly, there’s a lot of folks going through the Atlanta airpot that I hope won’t consider flying if it comes to that.

J.