Twice in 2014, five JetBlue/Delta crew members allegedly smuggled large amounts of what they believed to be drug money through secure areas of Boston Logan and onto commercial flights. It was just a sting operation but goes to show how lax security still is.
To be clear, those were ground workers, not flight crew members. But I question the idea that this type of incident means security is “lax”.
We already put people through background checks if they work in secure areas. When I was an airline pilot they did a background check on me and I still had to go through some form of security every day at the airport. What else are we supposed to do?
A person can pass a background check, do everything they are supposed to do on the job for years, then decide to do something bad. It doesn’t happen that way very often, so adding more layers of security to guard against the possibility would be haphazard, wasteful and further slow things down. To say nothing of the fact that a sufficiently deranged pilot doesn’t need to bring a weapon through security to cause a major problem.
These guys got caught. Great, others will be too if they try similar nonsense. But these people are not representative of the great majority of people in the industry. If we design processes with the main goal of thwarting these outliers, it would be… Well, it would look a lot like what we have now, but worse.
That’s just the most recent one I could find during a quick look. In 2009, a few American Airlines employees were among 20 people caught in a drug bust. They were sneaking bags of drugs into cargo holds; how hard would it be for someone to put a bomb in there?
It’s possible, but unlikely and further measures to prevent that scenario might cause more problems than they’re worth. Background checks and security cannot prevent every problem. At some point, people need to be trusted.
Many airport ground staff have greater access to sensitive airport areas than pilots do. Why? Because if they had to go through security each time they traversed from one area to another during the course of their duties the system would grind to a halt. So those people are background checked and subject to various kinds of random checks.
We have not yet put body cameras on them, required them to keep logs of how they spend each second of the day, or have two of them turn keys and double authenticate access codes every time they need to enter the ramp area to grab a passenger’s carry-on.
Most people don’t want to put bombs on airplanes, and would resist doing so. Even under blackmail or other duress, even when offered large sums of money. And there are enough other people around that it would likely be caught. It’s not a perfect system, but attempting to mitigate EVERY last possibility would create more problems.
Ever heard of the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh?
He finally quit after being written up for wearing a watch at his hospital. The article above only mentions it briefly, but I’ve read other comments he’s made about it. He says, correctly I think, if you design a system to thwart a very tiny percentage of people who are doing things wrong and come down on everyone else in the process, you’re going to have problems.
Bringing this back to the larger thread, yes a single individual can, under some circumstances, if we are very unlucky, cause major problems in aviation. It’s unlikely, there are processes in place to prevent it, and it’s very rare. But you can’t eliminate every possibility of a problem, and trying to do so will likely bring bad consequences to the system as a whole.
We’re getting away from my point: fj’s “much more improved security” doesn’t really exist.
So one plausible theory for the loss of Malaysian airlines flight 370 is :
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An electrical fire started in the avionics bay and filled the cockpit, which has a separate air exchange, with smoke.
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The pilots followed the correct procedures for dealing with the fire, including turning towards the nearest airport and disabling a number of circuit breakers, before succumbing to the smoke.
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The passengers were trapped, unable to enter the cockpit, for many hours on the doomed flight until the plane ran out of fuel. They were probably alive and well, the smoke probably didn’t fill the whole aircraft.
A horror scene, but quite possibly what happened. Had the doors been openable, it was possible that a passenger with sufficient flight experience could have landed the plane, or possibly they could have dragged the unconscious pilots out of the smoke filled cockpit and resuscitated them.
The theory breaks down here. Correct procedure is to put oxygen masks on then the other stuff. Oxygen masks mean they don’t succumb to the smoke for quite a long time. Plenty of time to tell someone what is happening.
It breaks down upstream of there. I just checked on the 777 air system. The airflow is from the cockpit into the avionics bay. Which then exhausts into the cabin, or in the event of detected smoke, directly overboard.
To be sure, one can posit that somehow the pilots became incapacitated. Perhaps a smoky fire in the cockpit itself? What about a windshield failing completely and the 500 knot hurricane comes inside? Perhaps it was some MFing snakes. I hear the krait is endemic to Malaysia and is pretty lethal. Or maybe everybody aboard was incapacitated due to a pressurization problem or a fire?
No way to know.
In any event, we’re drifting a long way from the OP’s question. It’s guesswork piled on top of guesswork to assert that the reinforced cockpit door was the critical link that caused the MH370 situation to be unrecoverable.
As **Llama **so wisely said, it’s worthwhile to evaluate systems for improvements. It’s stupid to insist that every conceivable problem scenario, regardless of likelihood, must have a countermeasure devised for it, regardless of cost or practicality.
If we’re actually interested in mitigating risks created by the current reinforced cockpit door, the thing we need most is an auxiliary second barrier between the forward lav / galley area and the cabin. Something like a toddler or pet fence, but stout and floor to ceiling that could be easily deployed and locked before opening the cockpit door to exchange crew for lav breaks, rest breaks, food & water, etc. The current countermeasures used to impede somebody from charging the cockpit while the door is open are functionally inadequate. Closing the aux barrier first before opening the reinforced door would mitigate that risk with few if any downsides.
Right now by far the most dangerous flight maneuver we perform on a routine basis is opening that door while “defended” by a flight attendant.