Well maybe not, but I can’t find anything wrong with it. Can you ? I got the idea from the Six Imams Ejected For Praying thread where it was pointed out that a couple of Imams unneccessarily requested seat belt extensions. I have no idea how long they are, but the idea to use them as a garotte came to mind.
The Plan:
8 men seated as couples next to a window in 4 separate locations on an American plane headed for Poland.
Once in the air, the window seat men pull out their under seat luggage and withdraws their leather gloves. The other four men lean over to obscure this activity.
Out of the middle finger of these gloves is pulled 5 feet 0f compacted 30# fishing line. Each window seat man puts on his gloves and prepares the garotte.
On a signal each window seat man places the garotte over the throat of the passenger in front of him. The man next to him plays shotgun.
If their is any trouble, one of the passengers is executed.
A demand is made to fly to Islamist controlled Somalia.
I think that all you’ve discovered is that killing people isn’t all that hard when you come right down to it.
The main reason there aren’t more terrorism events is simply a matter of the lead terrorists having more power as terrorists than they will ever get by living in a whole and unconflicted nation. They don’t want to solve any problems in their heart of hearts. Either that or they’re just too stupid to think of all the easy things they could be doing that would be eighty times more effective. shrug
(1) Some of the passengers will take matters into their own hands, rather than let you put the plane in a situation where everyone dies.
(2) The Air Force will send up some fighters to escort your plane, limiting the options that you or the pilots have. And you can’t kill one of your hostages because you see an Air Force plane out the window: that really will cause panic both inside and outside the plane.
Great Dutchman, now you’ve done it.
We can’t take gloves in our walk on luggage.
All those little kiddies flying to see Grandama in New England getting frostbitten fingers.
I hope you’re proud of yourself.
(1)This will be more of a pre 9/11 hijacking where everyone knows the cockpit is secure and the demand to fly to a different destination will give plenty of hope to the passengers who will not try to be heroes.
(2) Perhaps the hijacking should occur out of range of American fighters. In any case, if European fighters get involved, they’ll know a destination is planned, and that the pilot is in control .
It would be easier to smuggle the wire onboard in shoelaces, assuming the wire isn’t metallic. Better access in the cabin. Easier to come up with an excuse, too; if anyone looks questioning, just say it’s to stop deep vein thrombosis.
I can’t honestly see a huge amount of advantage when a garrote is your only weapon. If you could somehow take out passengers in turn, yes, but a crowded plane is not exactly a place for stealthiness.
Hostage situations tend to go on for a very long time. Days, sometimes. You’d have to spend that entire time sitting in “ready to choke” position, or your victim escapes and the other passengers overwhelm you.
That’s why I’ve chosen Islamist controlled territory for the destination. Islamist fighters on the ground can take over the plane and do what they want in Somalia.
The problem is that threatening to kill passengers would not have the desired effect. The plane would never be diverted in a post 9/11 world, and the other passengers would beat the crap out of the hijackers even if it cost the lives of a few.
Probably it should also be added that it would take skill to kill someone with fishing line faster than it would take the ten burly fellows in the seats around you to incapacitate you.
But what’s the purpose of the hijacking? To go to Somalia/GenericIslamicHellholistan? What are you going to do when you get there? Leave the plane to be greeted as a hero? And so? If you have enough money to live in America, you have enough money to get to Somalia.
At the end of your exercise your best outcome is to end up in Somalia and escape into the general population. You can’t even kill the passengers you’ve got garrotted, because only the threat of killing them keeps the other passengers from stomping you into jelly.
Or is the plan to take the plane to Somalia and have all the passengers taken hostage once you get there? Frankly I don’t know if the pilot will agree to go to Somalia no matter how many passengers you threaten to kill. See, you threaten to kill one passenger per hijacker, but so what? If he lands in Somalia there’s a pretty good chance everyone is going to be killed and/or disappear. If I were the pilot I’d get on the intercom and tell the hijackers to look out the window. Then I’d dump a small amount of fuel and tell the hijackers that now we don’t have enough fuel to reach Somalia, so what now? We’re going to have to land in a friendly airport, and everyone else will evacuate the plane via the emergency exits and we’re in a standard hostage situation, except the SWAT team on the ground knows you don’t have any way of harming THEM.
So the pilot tells you to go screw. Go ahead and try to strangle people if you must, but while you’re trying to strangle them you’re helpless against the other passengers. Now, with conventional weapons like guns you can use the guns or even knives to fight anyone who tries to attack you. Not with the garrottes, they are only good for killing others.
So what does your stunt get you that garotting people at random on New York City subways and then escaping doesn’t get you?
Since hijacking planes to a destination has never been their motivation, I’m not sure what the point of this thread is? It’s a plan that wouldn’t work, to achieve an end that no one wants.
If those 8 men could blow up a plane or cause it to crash, that would meet their objectives. But I don’t see that happening with fishing line.
A garotte doesn’t have the same threat level as a gun or even a knife. If a guy charges me holding a garotte, I’m not scared in the same way as if it’s a box cutter. Likewise, you can’t kill someone in one easy stroke the same way as if it was a knife. It takes a minimum of several seconds to kill someone with a garotte, time in which the other passengers will beat you with their books, laptops, and knitting needles. And you’ve still got almost no way to force your way into the cockpit, which is what it would take to get a pilot to do what you want, because since 9-11 no pilot is going to open the cockpit no matter what.
