I mean, it would seem easier to steal the cargo at the airport before it got on the plane, just bribe a few ground workers, I guess. Steal some passports, hijack, then divert the plane just for cargo
Exactly.
Even if we want to be horrible about it and suggest beating up and possibly killing ground worker(s), that's a waaaaaaay off killing 240+ people on an airplane.
If the reason for all this stuff is that a single person can kill hundreds of people, an obvious solution would be to only have the security procedures on flights of more than 100 people.
This is a really weird characterization of a normal airplane function.
First, you are seeming to act as if the power between passengers and pilots should be equal. Why would this ever be? The pilot has all the power and the passengers none. Thinking of past hijackings, it's obvious that it must be this way.
Second, the plane needs to be able to handle all sorts of 1 in a million events. Recall there were around 22 million flights in 2021, and of those, exactly 1 was involving a Boeing or Airbus jet (maybe that's even true for Embraer or Bombardier and that tier of airliner). This is because the pilot has a vast amount of controls that are required to handle various events. A plane is a pressurized tube flying thru the sky, of course controls for pressure in the cabin must exist to allow equalization under aberrant circumstances.
Finally, activating this "kill" switch would drop oxygen masks to every passenger in the plane automatically; the pilot does not have any say in this matter. While these masks obviously have limited duration, there isn't exactly a way the pilot could perform this mass murder without their own death or imprisonment being guaranteed too. Frankly, I find your representation of the purpose of the switch so immature as to be offensive.
And it yet goes to show that anybody smart can maim or kill others. Call it a MacGuyver-ism or something.
And yet in all these cases, it took intent.
Cases that could be done:
1. Self-inflict nasty disease. Anthrax/Ebola/H1N1
2. Surgery to put a bomb in a stomach. Im sure a chop-doc could do it in Tijuana for the right price.
3. Bomb in laptop or other computerized hardware.
4. Nerve agents: the local news showed barrels and barrels of a nerve agent and where you could find them. Wonder why no terrorist watches the news where this stuff can be easily found.
And the "best solution" is to have the company hire an anesthesiologist and put all passengers to sleep and stack them in racks.
Because 1 person can kill the 100s of others on board really easily. That's not true of any other means of transportation.
Edit:
People keep suggesting you could achieve the same result by:
* Blowing up the security queue \ lobby etc
* Blowing up a train\bus etc
* Blowing up a stadium
But this doesn't seem to be true. It's actually a lot less true than I thought.
A 747 carries 450+ people. An Airbus A380 carries over 850 people. A terrorist can kill them all with a single bomb. Plus people on the ground if they're over somewhere populated.
Compare that to the 7/7 bombings: 4 bombs, all large, detonated on very crowded trains (and one on a bus). They managed to kill 56 people total. Partly this is because jets are full of jet fuel, partly it's because anyone who survives ground attacks gets medical attention. Partly it's because you don't have to free fall 30k ft as well.
If the same 4 bombers took the same 4 devices onto planes, they'd might well have killed 1000s of people.
It's a surprising difference in effect. I hadn't realised it was this big a difference. But it's very clear. Blowing up a crowd or a ground based transport system is much less lethal than blowing up a plane.
When an airplane is shot at by a civilian, in 99.999% of cases there will be no big issues (read : multiple deaths).
Making an entire transportation system with hundreds of thousands of people inside that can all be killed instantly by a single bullet or bomb is insane lunacy.
2 tons of gold are something that a reasonable person can actually expect to be able to convert into money without undue risk to his person. A stolen airplane isn't.
People keep talking about how this needs so much sophistication that it's probably a state action.
All I can see is something that one person with good planning could have done. That is, the pilot or the co-pilot waits until the other guy visits bathroom, climbs high enough and disables pressurization to knock out/kill the passengers and the rest of the crew, then disable communications, turn off transponder, sneak out of controlled airspace behind another plane, land anywhere with an unused strip with a truck waiting, abscond with the cargo.
That requires sophistication and careful planning, but is not beyond the realm of the possible.
> they'll have a nice leisurely ride to a waiting SWAT team
...and no reason not to murder the entire passsenger load on the way there, save possibly to have hostages once the aircraft's on the ground. I really don't think you have thought this all the way through.
I think it hasn't happened yet because there are very few people who actually WANT to do that. The TSA and other security agencies would have you believe that the world is full of mass murderers. Based on the evidence, I'd say that's not true.
It's taken a very long time for this development to come to fruition. There was a lot of discussion about some sort of blastproofing for the cargo containers after Lockerbie (Pan AM 103).
It's a nice idea. Containing a troublesome passenger inside something like that seems overkill unless they're wearing some sort of bomb.
The thing to remember is gases can penetrate fabric. If such a miscreant (it's HN, so I won't give my usual description) came aboard wearing a bomb with a chemical agent underneath it could leave the crew with a big surprise.
Yea, I thought an interesting plot point would be to have an attack carried out like that with peoples bare hands. So, now people are debating if tranquilizing strong passengers is enough or if we need to tranquilizes everyone.
While I agree it's nonsense, I'm curious what would change without harming the personal security of everyone involved? I mean this system has many flaws but no one can steal a plane again and crash it into innocent people right?
Also, throwing debris into the engines would just result in an emergency landing.
The TSA is ridiculous and there isn’t a need to try to contrive examples to justify what they could prevent outside of hijacking.
If their goal was to prevent killing just a plane load of people, they would have to setup perimeters far around the airport to prevent people with a 50 caliber rifle from shooting up the cockpit during takeoff roll.
They would also need to block private air access to the airport because someone could just drive a truck of explosives underneath a plane load of people taxiing.
Put differently, it their job was just mass casualty prevention in transit caused by other people, they would need to be near every bus station, controlling road access near buses, guarding all railroad tracks with passenger routes, etc.
Being given control of the aircraft is secondary. You've condemned 200 odd people to death cause of one person on the flight. A small bomb, any thing to disrupt the flight will do that. (This is very easy as opposed to going to a theater or other urban crowded locations and staying alive long enough to take out that many people). The point being your only option is to lose everyone on the plane. Is that a casualty you're willing to accept. Security works by deterrence. If every time someone starts shooting in theaters and schools, the casualty is upwards of 200, its going to be a more viable option. Its a question of the cost of doing something vs the damage it causes. the inherent nature of flights (Since they fly), is that it takes relatively less effort to get one to crash. And it terms of preparation (in this ideal scenario as per this article), one guy just has to walk into a plane with items you get in your local store (propane maybe?). Im not an expert on this, but i just feel the effort required is just ridiculously easy if there is going to be no one to keep a tab on what you carry/have access to on a flight.
I don't see how it gives them any extra incentive to murder. I'd say it gives them less, since there's nothing to gain.
It's also a better situation by far than letting them crash the plane into a building, and if the system is known to exist it's a deterrent against hijacking planes in the first place. And if there's a struggle on board, it's less likely that the struggle will cause a crash.
>Until 9/11, there was never a plot that involved intentionally hijacking an airliner with the intent of using it as a weapon and killing everyone on board.
Fedex Flight 705 (7 April 1994), before 9/11. Pilot tried to kill other pilots so he could crash plane into FedEx hub and destroy it and employees. Was subdued, barely, by a pilot with cracked skull that then managed to land the plane.
Egypt Air 990 (31 October 1999), before 9/11. Pilot deliberately killed everyone on board, thought it wasn't a weapon.
When was the last time a criminal killed ~240 people in order to steal some loot?
The solution proposed would, at best, be extraordinary; flippantly adding mass murder makes it absurd.
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