The Glaser Safety Slug will not go through a body and come out the other side, and it is specifically made to be deflected off hard objects. Great on planes, apparently. The Air Marshall on MY flights will have my FULL ATTENTION and RESPECT!
Personally, I think everyone should get on the plane wearing a hospital gown and nothing else. And anyone who even LOOKS suspicious gets a full BC check.
b.
Man, all this tolerance and patience from a population that routinely zig-zags through heavy traffic to get to a destination five minutes earlier.
Peace,
mangeorge
No, and the AM also can’t do anything when someone breaks a vial of Anthrax on the plane. And when someone opens his briefcase to reveal a suitcase nuke, the AM can’t do anything either.
Think of the more realistic scenarios for seizing an airplane. I didn’t post my idea as a panacea for all security problems, but as a cost-effective increase in the level of security.
So…given your scenario, the hijacker is already on board with the pin pulled, please tell me what your idea for stopping him is. You posed the scenario, now give me your solution.
This is what I was concerned about, the hole growing due to the differential pressure and the weakening of the integrity of the skin. The pressure will be able to push on the sides of the hole along the plane’s longitudinal axis, where it is much weaker.
The Glaser Safety Round was mentioned. This is ideal for aircraft use. A glaser slug will disintigrate even after hitting thin plywood, and the stuff that comes out the other side probably wouldn’t even penetrate drywall. So that’s an easy solution.
Air Marshals are a good idea, but you do NOT want them visible. First, it spooks the passengers. Second, it gives the hijackers a control. Now they just have to figure out how to take out the air marshal, and their problem is solved. A utility knife (“Box Cutter”) can be used to slit the throat of an Air Marshal before he has a chance to do anything, and then the hijacker as a utility knife AND a gun.
The real value in the air marshal program is surprise. Terrorists can’t plan for the unknown. If they try to take over a plane, and they know that there’s a good chance that one passenger out of 100 has a gun and knows how to use it, they have a real problem. Now they can’t turn their back on *anyone. It’s a real deterrant.
And, because it’s unknown, you really don’t need one on every flight. Even if they were only on 50% of the flights, the deterrant is valid. If Bin Laden knew that 50% of his attack planes could be stopped, he probably would have looked for a different delivery method.
I tried to cover this topic in my “Revised Hijacking Protocol Thread”.
As to hijackers trying to lure out the Air Marshall with a phony “air rage” ploy, this is specifically why I recommend that all passengers participate in abating any such incident. This would enable the undercover Air Marshall to maintain cover and still assist in wailing the snot out of the instigator.
I thought I read that there are prototype weapons from most hangun mfgs that recognize the owners fingerprint, and would only fire when in the “owners” possesion.
That should solve this problem nicely.
The grenade scenario is “the more realistic” one.
But, in your so-called “more realistic” hand grenade scenario, it’s a given that the presence of an AM would not help. How do you think the absence of an AM would help? If neither presence nor absence have any bearing on the outcome, it’s an utterly moot point in this discussion.
Simple.
Magnets and a reinforced breadbox.
First: It’s not a “so-called more realistic scenario.” It’s been done before.
Second: The fact that it’s quite easy to negate the presence of an armed law enforcement agent on the aircraft is the exact point of the issue. Since it doesn’t matter if the individual’s armed when it comes to defusing the situation, then it’s irresponsible to introduce into the particular environment (pressurized cabin, high altitude, freaking huge jet that really doesn’t glide all that well, etc.) a potential for greater hazard, it’s best to find other solutions.
Third: Other solutions can include: professional law enforcement agents screening ALL items entering the airplance; professional law enforcement agents patrolling the perimiters of the airports to prevent contraband from entering the airport that way; professional law enforcement agents conducting random searches of airport and airline employees to prevent contraband from being introduced via “inside jobs.”
Fourth: Revisiting the “utterly moot” comment above: The absence of another armed agent (the sky marshall) lessens the potential of explosive decompression.
Thought about for that a while, did you, Freedom 
Peace,
mangeorge
I also thought this, but can’t find a thread to save my cute little butt.
Any cites on ‘explosive decompression’ available?
There’s quite a lot of air in the plane at altitude, but not at a very high relative pressure. Seem’s it would just leak out.
Just trying to relieve Monty’s worried mind a little.
Peace,
mangeorge
Monty, if you will recall, it was you that threw out a moot scenario as the first rebuttal of my OP, not myself. And my point by responding with suitcase nukes was to illustrate that a moot point does not answer my OP.
Now you have returned with some actual valid points, but ones that I think can be rebutted.
There is a danger to avionics in the plane from bullets. Frangible ammunition (i.e., Glaser rounds) can eliminate a lot of risk. A short, but hardly scientific note on this, is here.
I really, really want to see a definitive cite that says that a bullet hole, or even several, is going to cause explosive decompression. I also do not believe that these holes in the skin will be likely to widen to cause a catastrophic failure through the vast majority of the surface area of the aircraft. If you may recall, fighter craft have been shot up at all sorts of speeds, even supersonic, and have not come apart from a few holes. You may also not know this, but take a good look at the skin of the airplane next time you fly. It is filled with holes - rivet holes to hold the plane together. The metal is pierced in tens of thousands of places all over the plane.
You also must be opposed to the current Air Marshall’s program, since every single one of these plainclothes Marshalls must in your view represent an unacceptable risk to the passengers, right?
I think a valid assumption is that a terrorist with a grenade with the pin pulled is going to destroy the plane anyways, either by the grenade or by ordering it to a target to crash. There is a non-zero chance neither will happen, but given the new face of air terrorism I don’t think that is the most likely scenario any more.
No matter how many times you call it moot, it doesn’t make my assertion moot.
Yes, there are rivets and rivet holes in the aircraft. The fact of the matter is the aircraft CABIN is pressurized. Next time you fly, take a gander at the windows, you just might notice that it’s not a sieve.
Yes, I am opposed to introducing armed individuals onto an aircraft. One tends to use whatever’s handy to respond to a threat. If the threat escalates, then the response escalates.
There are far more objections to the “sky marshall” program than what I’ve mentioned.
Anybody can think up a ridiculous scenario to explain why any particular security measure won’t work. Sure, there are ways to neutralize a law enforcement officer. So what?
Yes, if he has a gun, somebody else could have a gun and shoot him. So fucking what? One guy with a gun would have made the difference between a) business as usual at the World Trade Center, and b) being forced to listen to Jewel’s songs interspersed with audioclips from the news and 14,000 repeats of Whitney Houston’s horrible rendition of the National Anthem.
Like it or not, the fact is that the presence of armed security will reduce the chances of a life-threatening incident. Is there such a thing as perfect airline security? Yep: Nobody fly. Short of that, EVERY measure is going to have flaws that can be exploited. But do you guys really believe that just because there can’t be a perfect solution that the status quo is good enough? That’s just f-ing stupid.
Anthracite:
I was just discussing this the other day with a couple other dopers, and my personal solution involves armed security, both uniformed (1) and plainclothes (1+, depending on tickets sold) on every flight. My plan is a little more expensive than yours, but since you came up with $5 per ticket, we’ll just be safe and say my plan will cost $20 per.
Can a gun be dangerous on a plane? Sure. But so is having heavy passenger jets slam into occupied office buildings.
Security = defense. Defense = minimized risk of attack. Period.
Oh, since my sig seems to be appropriate to the discussion, I thought I’d add it.
Destruct button on the ground. Hey, we gotta play hardball, don’t we?
Sigh. Why do we always have to overreact to everything? Now we’re banning nail clippers on airplanes and wanting to put in emergency ground-control systems?
Look, this attack caught us by surprise. But that mode of attack is forever gone now, unavailable to terrorists. Because they know that if they try it again every single person on that flight is going to fight to the death to prevent the terrorists from achieving their goals.
I mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again. Terrorists go after soft targets. That is, targets that are undefended, where their attack has a high probability of success. Airplanes used to be soft targets. They aren’t any more.
And before the 11th, domestic hijacking was pretty much a non-concern. When is the last time an American died in a hijacking attempt on American soil?
So the threat to airlines is probably over, but we’re going to spend billions of dollars to turn airplanes into flying tanks. Then next week, a semi-trailer full of Ammonium Nitrate will detonate on the Golden Gate Bridge in rush hour, and suddenly everyone will start demanding to know why we just let semis roam around wherever they want. Truck driving schools will come under scrutiny, and there will be demands for new security measures for trucks. And we’ll lose some more freedoms and spend a bunch of money, but the terrorists won’t be planning to use THAT method again either. The next attack might come with a gas attack in a subway, like what happened in Japan. Then we’ll start putting police all through subways, and demanding gas masks for everyone in a subway tunnel…
You can never beat terrorism by securing the target of LAST week’s attack. Sure, the Israeli Airline has great security, but all that did was re-route the efforts of terrorists into something less secure. And in the meantime, Israelis spend much more for their air travel and give up many freedoms. I don’t see this as much of an improvement.
Sure, we can improve security, and close some loopholes. Maybe a few extra air marshals would be a good idea - Anthracite’s numbers look pretty good to me, and indicates that we can afford it. And even better, Air Marshals don’t require that we give up freedom or privacy.
But that’s enough. The real answer lies in destroying terrorism at the source, preventing them from building support and funding so they don’t have the resources to take on projects like this. Better intelligence, so that the hijacker is quietly intercepted and hauled off before he even gets on the plane.
And the most effective of all - a populace that doesn’t rely on the government to protect them, but learns to protect itself. We all need to become like the brave people on flight 93. If everyone takes personal defense seriously, then the whole country becomes a ‘hard’ target.
Granted, there’s not much you can do to defend yourself from a bomb, but if one of these terrorists just pulls out a machine gun and starts spraying a crowded mall, I hope there are a few Todd Beamers or Mark Binghams nearby.
I was gonna applaud until you got to the part where everybody carries concealed handguns all the time. Oh well, at least you make a necessary point about how we always fight the previous war.