This is what I’m thinking. The Germanwings incident proved that if a terrorist can manage to get into the cockpit and lock the door behind him, he can absolutely crash the plane anywhere that’s in range. And the most likely way to get a terrorist into the cockpit would be as the co-pilot. Because, every seasoned pilot has to start somewhere.
Sure, but a series of bombs/shootings at various events/locations - crowded malls, commuter stations, trains, busses, amusement parks, theaters, sporting events, parades, etc. - would be a lot easier to bring about, and could have a pretty significant impact on social behavior and the economy.
This.
There are plenty of other parts of our infrastructure that are unguarded or loosely guarded, and that would scare lots of people and disrupt the economy. I’m not going to list my ideas, because if one of them happened I would wonder if it might possibly be my fault, but I have come up with a few, friends have come up with a few more… and no doubt some clever terrorist could come up with yet other creative ideas.
This is among the reasons I hate the security theater we are all subjected to at the airport. Such a waste of time and energy. So many vulnerabilities we aren’t even looking at.
I wonder if your basic suicidal terrorist would be content with dying to take half a dozen people at a public event with him.
Seems to be no shortage of them in the Middle East. And, with a little training and planning, I don’t know why they’d have to be content with a half dozen.
But I guess I should be happy that I don’t think like a terrorist…
I would imagine that targeting softer targets would mean that it is easier to be a regular bomber. The fact that you don’t necessarily have to suicide would open up the number of volunteers as well.
Save your suicide bombers for airport security lines, football games, and other areas where lots of people gather but security is non-existent but an unattended package would be out of place.
The Boston Marathon bombing killed even fewer, and look at the enormous social, community and media impact it had.
Also in hindsight, it was stupid we let these men take flying lessons when they had no obvious job target and never showed an interest in learning to land the plane.
I think just the fact that anyone of middle east heritage is going to be looked at with caution makes it harder. Its the saying “if you see it, report it”. A couple of years ago a middle eastern man bought a pressure cooker from us at a garage sale and my wife reported it.
I’d say the biggest danger would be the sniper scenario. This came up during the DC sniper killings - two people were driving around the Washington area and shooting random people with a rifle.
Now this was just one pair of civilians, traveling in one area, who were caught in less than a month. Imagine how much worse it would be if some terrorist organization gave fifty terrorists some training in evasion and some good resources. Split them up into twenty-five teams and tell them to travel around the country, shooting people at random.
You’d have ten to twenty people getting killed each day and no ready means to stop the attacks. How do you find twenty-five pairs of shooters in an entire country if they have some training and supplies? Even if you do catch some of them, each pair is independent so they can keep operating even when some are stopped. And the terrorist organization can always send new people in.
The result would be you’d have every person in the country living under the fear that they could be killed by terrorists at any moment. People would be afraid to leave their homes. Businesses would shut down. People would stop traveling. There would be dozens of people getting shot because they acted suspicious in some way.
Next time, only sell it to a Real American.
Pretty amazing 20/15 hindsight you gots, there.
So the 9/11 flights had locked flight deck doors, for some reason… and the hijackers start slowly cutting flight attendants’ throats, so the flight crew can hear them bubble, scream and moan. (That may have occurred anyway.)
Since all hijackings prior to 9/11 ended in airport standoffs, how long do you think the doors would have stayed locked? More crew and passengers gruesomely murdered, or follow the hijackers demands and spend an unpleasant day or two with the army around your plane on the ground?
The rules didn’t change until the planes hit their targets.
Yes, prior to 9/11 hijackings were mostly of the “take me to Cuba!” variety. And pilots were trained to obey the hijackers and buy time. THAT changed pretty much the minute the second plane hit the WTC. The only OTHER change we needed to prevent a rerun of 9/11 was armored doors to the cabin. I thought that part went without saying.
Doesn’t change the fact that there are plenty of soft targets left in the US that would cause major disruptions if attacked.
You have this backwards. This has been the rule in the U.S. for years, but not in other parts of the world. Though I believe that began to change about ten seconds after the Germanwings crash.
The OP was referring to either Sept 1, 1 or Jan 9, 1. (or possibly Jan 1, 9)
No November involved there in any case.
What exactly could the police do?
Say, “Thank you, Ma’am”, and pretend to write it down.
I can see this, but with bombs, not rifles. It has to be somewhat tougher to do this than you’d think, or someone would have done it by now. My money was on the Serbs in 1999, and yet it never happened. Good thing.
So then he just has to murder his also-locked-in copilot first and then crash the plane. Not too hard.
But I’m in the “terrorists are probably more creative than this” camp. What happened on 9/11 was shocking. The next big attack on US soil will be too, and it probably won’t involve a plane because we now expect that sort of thing, and their motivation wasn’t only to kill a bunch of Americans but leave us shaken by doing something no one much had ever seriously worried about before that day.
Perhaps a job at a nuclear power plant. There were many Saudis at undergraduate school with me at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in the Electronic Engineering Technology program.