The first thing that comes to my mind is that the pilot and crew need to eat - the cabin crew take food, drinks etc into the cabin, so a door is needed.
However, it seems to me before such measures are taken, the terrorists need to be stopped from getting onto the plane in the first place, and from what ive heard, and experienced, US flight security (X-raying baggage, metal detectors, spot checks etc.) is pretty lax, so this needs to be stepped up. It really isnt that inconvenient to just put your bag through an X-ray machine, and most big airports are international anyway so they should already have X-ray machines. Even if they don’t, surely its better to spend a few million dollars (or whatever) on some X-ray machines than to let terrorists run amok in the country in hijacked planes. Make the airlines pay for them, or pay for it out of the vast defence budget (this probably qualifies as defence anyway) which, at the moment, seems to be a waste of money when this amount of devastation can be caused by a few men with knives.
Yes, they probably would, but that learning curve you are talking about is an awfully grim one.
I imagine that it would take exactly one planeload’s worth of wrongful death lawsuits in circumstances like this before these regulations would be flushed down the toilet.
I just missed your post, Attrayant, and that seems a good idea to me (much better than the ‘sealed door’ argument. I doubt terrorists would ever take over one of these remote control outposts though. If they were based in military bases, surrounded by troops, the terrorists could not take them over. I have never heard of such a large scale terrorist attack (by terrorists not from that country). (on the other hand, I have never heard of terrorists hijacking aeroplanes in order to deliberately fly them at buildings, but anyway).
However, terrorists might be able to intercept the signal from a different outpost, or more simply, smash the slave computer in the plane, causing control to fall back onto the manual controls.
Despite this, it seems a good solution (if expensive) as the only other solution to a problem like this is to shoot down the plane to stop it hitting populated areas.
Yes, it would have to be tight security & a heavily encrypted signal, otherwise we end up with Diehard 2.
But maintaining airtight security for a control tower would, methinks, be easier than maintaining airtight security for each and every plane that takes off every day.
Also, learning how to send the proper command codes to remotely take control of your airplane is not something that you could go to pilot school and learn how to do. In the same way that terrorists can’t lean the nuclear launch codes that sleep in the president’s “football”.
Now, to more properly address the OP: I always thought the cockpits were sealed like bank vaults, and anybody wanting in would (at least) get identified through a peep-hole. Why should the security measures for my home be better than those of a 757 passenger aircraft-turned missile?
Well it turns out, according to the Boston Herald, hijackers gained access to the cockpit by first killing the flight attendants, prompting one of the pilots to come out of the cockpit to see what was the matter.
Pilots may have acquired a sense of complacency in recent years… in other words, he was stupid and let his guard down. In my opinion, an airplane cockpit should be more secure than an armored car, complete with gun portals in the door.
Banks & prisons have taken care of this by putting slender access slots in doors & gates. Or use one of those “only one side opens at a time” compartments like at the post office. Open one side, insert contents, close & lock door, and then and only then can the opposite side be opened. This is a very low-tech but effective method.
I personally am willing to go on board with no carry-on luggage, and I would also be willing to surrender any stabbing or cutting device, even something as silly as scissors.
When I was on jury duty a few weeks ago, I had to pass through a metal detector to get into the court house, and my bag was x-rayed. They managed to locate & confiscate a small pair of child’s safety scissors in my bag. These are the scissors with the blunt tips that you might give to a blind epileptic child. These scissors would have a hard time cutting through a stick of soft butter, but they took them anyway.
On a recent visit to a local amusement park, I saw a person relieved of a very small pocket knife. The blade in this thing couldn’t have been more than an inch long. And do you know how they found it? Metal detectors. That’s right, they now have metal detectors at amusement parks:
How is it that minimum-wage amusement park employees can locate & confiscate a keychain-fob miniature swiss army knife, but people can get on passenger jets with razor blades?
This idea has some flaws. The bad guys don’t need to capture a tower; all they have to do is spoof the control signal. This is especially bad, because it means that the bad guys don’t need to put themselves at risk; they can sit safely on the ground and disable all the planes they want to.
Unless you’ve got an unbreakable encryption mechanism (and there is no such thing) this is ill-advised.
Sorry, I simulposted, and wanted to response to this. The general thinking in cryptography / network security is that it cannot be made secure enough. You improve security by limiting or denying outside access, not by counting on encryption.
Personally, I like the “no carry on bags, period” idea. That would make the loading/unloading of the plane a lot faster too. (I mean, who hasn’t waited behind some idiot trying to cram his oversized bag into an undersized space in the overhead…?)
This time savings would help make up for the additional time spent in the line at the metal detectors.
Limit it to books, magazines and medications. That’s it.
(OK, everyone commence shooting holes in this idea… ;))
Well, it would cost more time to those of us who just carry a small backpack when we fly. I put my pack under the seat in front of me and I’m ready to go as soon as I can get out of my seat. It would take longer to get out of the airport if I had to wait for checked baggage.
Being hijacked by terrorists, rammed into a national landmarked and scraped up in pieces from the streets of Manhattan takes ALOT longer than waiting for your backpack to shoot onto a conveyor belt.
Trust me on this one.
I carry a small backpack with all of my “essentials” EVERYWHERE but I’d be more than willing to throw it in my suitcase in the name of safety. Anyone who isn’t strikes me as either lazy, selfish or completely apathetic about their own safety and/or the safety of those around them. Dont you think? It just seems like -small- price to pay. Really…
Lazy? Apathetic? Try logical. Suppose we make everyone get a background check (yeas, I’ve held a clearance) before they fly? That way we could make sure only non-terrorists get onto airplanes. Of course it would be inconvenient, what with a six-month investgation of your life, but if it saves just one life it will be worth it. The chances of being hijacked are very slim and we can increase security mearly by having people pay more attention instead of limiting the amount of luggage they carry.
Terrorists want to intimidate people into living in fear. We should not do what they want.
Then make it a line-of-sight microwave link, with a requirement that the transmitted signal be at least 500KW strong, or require two people in the control tower to turn brass keys in order to activate the system. I just can’t believe that there isn’t some way to create a secure communications link, especially when we hold a private code that wouldn’t be known to any would-be hackers/terrorists in advance. And if some how the signal is received & decoded by a hacker, and he figures out what kind of datastream to send in order to get the plane to do various manuvers, and has the right kind of cockpit emulator to guide the plane, too late. The plane has already been taken off manual control and guided over an empty stretch of land.
A terrorist would have to hit the virtual lottery to hack into that system.
One thing that has bugged me has been hearing about the tightening of the security on planes - namely the plans surrounding passenger luggage. If all yesterday’s hijackers had were things like box-cutters then it wouldn’t matter if they walked on with luggage or not. That sort of tool will fit in a boot (and a steel toed boot can very nicely explain setting off the security measures). Making innocents wait because they aren’t allowed to walk on with a backpack seems like a waste.
Although I do not fly much (only twice in my whole life) I am reasonably certain that any presence of metals needs to be explained. If your belt buckle is suspected as being responsible for setting off the metal detector, you will need to take your belt off and go through again. A passenger I once dropped off at the airport was made to do this.
When I went into the courthouse, I had to empty my pockets of all keys & change. The first time I had missed a few coins. The alarm went off again and the guard waved his magic wand over me, localizing the hide-away coins to the general vicinity of my pocket. Instead of saying “oh that’s probably just a few coins… go right on ahead”, he made me re-check all my pockets, fish out every last penny until I no longer set off the metal detectors.
It took a few minutes and pissed off a few people behind me, but if I were boarding a plane, I don’t think that there is anybody who would trade a slight inconvenience for the peace of mind in knowing that the plane they were boarding would not be used to snuff out the lives of 20 thousand people, including their own.
You would probably be required to remove your steel-toed boots for inspection. I know that if I was the security guard, I’d be suspicious as hell as to why you were getting on a flight wearing steel-toed boots.
I would hope that security people would be trained to act on anything suspicious like that. The stakes are simply too high. Airport security needs to be more invasive.
How about a remote control system that only allows for automatic landing at predetermined locations? No joystick remote control device, just a book of airport codes.
What? Flight 1313 isn’t responding? Aim the secure, encrypted, line-of-sight microwave signal at the aircraft and engage the remote landing system. Hmmmm… which airport is closest? Ah! Dustlicker, OK is on the flight path. Punch in the code!
The worst a code cracker could do with this system is set a plane down at an airport where we don’t want it. Inconvenient, yes. Catastrophic, no.
FWIW, I always get “the wand” when I go through airport secuity. (Well, not last time for some reason.) I like to be comfortable when I fly so I wear my hiking boots. The metal eyelets trigger the machine.
There are non-metal-based hi-tech explosives now, which show up on airport X-ray machines as an organic substance, as though it was the passenger’s lunch.
Attrayant, you miss the point. A hacker, on the ground, has nothing but time. Find the algorythm (which has to be published to be considered safe), and start coming up with ways to defeat it. Monitor a test transmition. Find the lead engineer on the project, or the person who designed the codes, torture them, and then you have the ability to control every plane in the sky. I don’t know how to overcome the whole 500KW thing, but that’s not my field.
And if you use something like a one-time pad, you have to change the pad frequently (this is what causes the “failure” of one-time pad encryption), which means there has to be a to modify the control software on the plane, which takes us back to the original problem.
If you want a secure system, you don’t add ways of accessing it. You take them away. My vote is to have a fourth person in the plane armed with frequently-not-lethal devices that don’t usually cause decompression of the plane.
Sorry, but they hijacked the planes with knives. No amount of security short of a strip search is going to catch a razor blade… and woe be the soul who carries his shaving kit onboard with him.
I travel quite a bit all over the US and have seen all manner of security. My belt always makes it go off and 9 out of 10 times I have to lift my shirt and flip the belt around for inspection.
I agree that limiting carry-on luggage is a good idea… to a single carry-on bag no larger than a compact computer maybe? Oh, not for security… just because I hate waiting behind people who travel with extensive carry-on luggage. they jam the bins and waste my time getting off, then I see them at the baggage claim waiting again. DOPE.
In the end I remain of the opinion that sky marshalls are probably the best bet… one on every flight, plainclothes.
As far as explosive decomression goes… any hole in a speedy aircraft is going to be subjected to a venturi[sup]*[/sup] force which will create a super low pressure zone at the hole. It isn’t necessarily the air pressure outside, it is the speed which the fluid passes the hole.
*[sub]now, venturi forces are usually understood in terms of liquids, and in fact they are usually in terms of liquids flowing at a constant speed with a smaller pass volume in the center of two larger spaces, but the principle here is the same and I don’t know if there is actually another name for this particular phenomenon— FWIW asparator vacuums work off the principle I describe above, whether or not “venturi” is the correct name. It is simply a high-velocity fluid moving across a hole of some sort.[/sub]
Before anyone else mentions Die Hard 2: Die Harder, go to http://www.imdb.com and check out the goofs page for this movie. There are so many (the only movie I’ve seen with more is Terminator 2: Judgement Day) that I’m certain nothing like this could ever happen.
erislover, I may have misunderstood what you are saying here, but if you’re saying that no metal detector would pick up a razor blade, I can tell you that’s not true. While the Gulf War was raging, I toured the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, D.C., and their metal detectors were cranked up so high that the wire rims of my glasses set them off. I imagine airports could do the same, but choose not to, due to the inconvenience involved.
I mean, the metal detectors at airports are so weak that I have on occasion walked through with a pocket full of change and not set them off.