How will it ever be safe to fly?

While remote control and Air Marshalls aren’t bad ideas, I’d also like to see U.S. airports institute the type of security El Al airlines and Israeli airports use to deter terrorism.

Matt Lauer explained briefly his experiences with flying El Al on this mornings Today Show. The way Lauer explained it is that El Al security don’t confront the traveler, but they “engage” each passenger several times before boarding. El Al security (perhaps some in plain clothes?) strikes up conversations with passengers, and carefully observe body language and demeanor. If anybody smells fishy, they get the boot.

Personally, I have no problem with a little profiling based on demeanor, body language, and other such tipoffs, as I will not be the one attempting to hijack a plane.

I’ll do you one better. It’s even safer.

i still don’t see myself flying anytime in the near future.

a) someone on CBS news this morning said there are still two guys out there with stolen pilot credentials and uniforms

b) copycat crime. They’ve outlawed knives on planes, but as far as I know, not pepperspray or knowing how to disable a transponder.

jarbaby

I apologize for not making myself more clear in the first post. Part of the idea of this thread wasn’t that I am afraid to fly or that it is inherently unsafe to fly. I didn’t ground all commercial aircraft! Part of the point is that the F.A.A. has grounded them until tighter security can be met, but when is it enough? Do they think that just searching people will solve this? Not according to the Former D.O.D. Inspector General, Mary Schiavo, who had studied the security at many top U.S. airports. Her conclusions were that no matter what technology we put into place at the gate there will always be holes.

So my point was to suggest one possible security measure that might eliminate some of these holes. Since it’s on the jet itself and not at the gates, it would be less intrusive to the passengers.

Periodically we as a nation need to look at our present way of doing things and rethink them. I think this it one of those times. If we are going to solve the security problems aboard all commercial aircraft we need to take a serious look at some of our newer technologies.

Several of the suggestions I’ve seen wouldn’t be any more difficult to install than were the on board phones they now have slapped on the back of everyone’s seat.

-Waneman

I’m mostly with Barbarian on this one. Slate had an interesting article about it today:

http://slate.msn.com/framegame/entries/01-09-13_115402.asp

I would love to see locked cockpits, as well as security personnel, both uniformed and plain clothes on airplanes. It would probably cut down on all the obnoxious “air rage” incidents as well.

I know some pretty scary stuff has happened lately, but I refuse to give up my freedom. I am not going to be scared of getting on an airplane. As soon as you let your fear take control of your life, you lose. I’m not going to let these heartless people beat me. Don’t give them the satisfaction of scaring you.

Pepperspray on an airplane would be a really, really bad idea…

I agree with you to an extent, but wait until that night when you’ve been flying all day with lay-overs and you have a cold or a flu. You might get booted because your answers were lethargic and you were sweating a great deal.

The F.B.I. has been using profiling for years and any agent will tell you it is only good for certain situations. By matching this with investigative psychology and Behavioral Evidence Analysis or BEA techniques, gate and security personnel will certainly produce some positive hits during a given aircraft boarding, but of these positive hits only 1 in 22,000* will likely be a criminal suspect. Is it fair for those who are summarily “booted” to use your words, for innocuous reasons, when they might only be suffering from a head cold or stressed from fear of flying?

On the flip side of profiling, will we then be detained because of the clothes we wear or our hair length?
*This figure is based loosely on criminal data and population statistics from 1998.

-Waneman

      • You been watching too many movies - knives are no match for firearms, scooter. No ifs, ands or buts about it. The question we can now pose is this: as much as you don’t want to see a beligerent drunk fatally shot in the center aisle on your vacation flight, you want to see the airplane steered into a building even less. Armed guards are cheap, simple and the quickest plan of action available: the guards tell you to sit down and shut up, or they shoot you. And taken from the other direction, under the circumstances, the only way to stop a suicidal hijacker from acting is to kill them. I don’t see the problem here.
        ~
        As far as being “another way to get a gun on the flight”, well, see, you’re being silly. To remove all of the security risks associated with people, we’d have to remove all the people, and the plane wouldn’t be quite as useful then. -And you’d need all that fancy remote control quantum stuff to fly it around.
        ~
        Some here are trying to dream up a fantasy setting where commercial passenger flight is as open and friendly as always but everyone’s capacity to do harm is removed, and that will never happen. The easier/cheaper/faster solution is to place lethally destructive power in the hands of a few trusted individuals. It’s not so outrageous a concept; you see police do it on Cops every episode, except they don’t show the calls where somebody gets killed - but people do get fired on and killed. Sometimes it’s accidental, sometimes the reasoning is flimsy, but most of the time not. How much do you worry about getting intentionally shot without grounds by the police? If all the police had to give up using firearms, do you think crime would increase or decrease? Today (well, Monday, anyway) pilots weren’t supposed to be armed, but as I understood it they were supposed to “take steps” to control violent passengers. It didn’t work Tuesday, and quite frankly it never worked before Tuesday, either. - MC

Very good post MC.

I must add that the pilots have been instructed to cooperate with hijackers, which up to now worked. The hijackers always wanted to go somewhere. No one ever dreamed that 19 men could participate in a year long plan to commit suicide. Possibly, they reinforced each others resolve or maybe the experts were just plain wrong.

Oh, and about those remote controlled planes. I have no fear of flying. Many years ago, I trained in Pensacola and landed on an aircraft carrier. At my age now, I doubt if I’ll ever have an opportunity to ride on a remote controlled plane, but if I do I’ll have “white knuckles” all the way.

Folks, there’s a real simple concept here I think the world woke up to on Tuesday:

The world is not a safe place - and it never will be

Everything we do, from the time we get up to the time we go to bed, carries a certain amount of risk. People die in their sleep, too. The only thing we can do is choose between one risk and another, we simply can’t elminate all risk.

So ask yourself what you are willing to give up for less risk, knowing there will always be some risk.

Also remember what (IIRC) Thomas Jefferson said: “Those who would trade liberty for security shall have neither”

Also remember that any safety system can have unintended consequences and risks of its own. For instance - airbags save lives, but they also have taken them. Install encrypted equipment to let someone control a plane from the ground? All the “unbreakable” codes of the past have been broken, and we must accept the possibility of our current codes being broken. Armed sky marshalls? Then we must accept that somewhere at some time an innocent but belligerent passenger may be killed.

We aren’t “safe”, and we never have been. The only thing that has changed is now we know it. Now we must learn to go forward despite our fear and live our lives to the fullest

**

Oh, brother. I know I’m going to get flamed for this, but…

“Instead of raising your hand to ask a question in class, how about individual push buttons on each desk? That way, when you want to ask a question, you just push the button and it lights up a corresponding number on a tote board at the front of the class. Then all the professor has to do is check the lighted number against a master sheet of names and numbers to see who is asking the question.”

Now, I know that’s facetious. But I’ve been reading so many threads about airline safety I’m getting punchy, and the systems being outlined are starting to sound like Jack Handey schemes to me. They’re also prompting me to quote Montgomery Scott, not for the first time since 9/11: “The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”

I agree with the solution people were suggesting early on, but that seems to have been abandoned: guards on the plane itself. Not armed, of course, but highly skilled in defense. The salaries would be much less expensive than high-tech adaptations of ground-air communication; there would be no risk of tampering or error, and there wouldn’t be that point-of-no-return where the computer’s just going to do what it’s going to do, even if that’s become a bad thing.

I also realize that this system won’t be without its weak spots. But I believe computer chips should only be used to keep the plane balanced, regulate the fuel intake, or whatever they currently do: tasks that are purely physical. I would never feel safe knowing that my fate in an uncontrolled situation was being determined by a fixed program.