You seem to be big on this deterrent idea, but let me ask you something. Many states have death as a deterrent for murder, and the rest have serious jail time…how’s that deterrent working out? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Of course. And in truth, it was already being used in comedy routines on a regular basis, any time a comic wanted to complain about the delays getting onto an airplane.
Sometimes the old jokes are the best. Sometimes they are wise beyond belief.
Yea, I know that, thanks to mass media, that is probably the default assumption. However, that doesn’t mean its the correct one, or that people will act upon it. Of course, there will be some people that will want to play hero and crash the plane to save the others. However, I hold out hope that there are still rationally minded people in the world that would require more than an assumption and a singular past event to take an action that, should the airline not be aimed at a larger target, be considered 2nd-degree mass murder.
Yea, thats the problem with making in possible to turn the thing off. However, if there is absoulately no method of turning it off, then any maulfunction or accidental activation means a very long delay.
Now, I agree with whoever said that this system combats a problem that doesn’t exsist, or, at best, solves the wrong problem. The likelihood of hijackers using planes as guided missles, rather than simply threatening to blow them up is close to 0. (the latter has happened since 9/11, the former hasn’t) I can argue against another 9/11 style hijacking all day, but that isn’t the point of this thread.
Lets assume that, sometime in the future, this system is implemented, then activated when the most likely hijacker - one with a some form of a bomb - takes over a plane and starts making demands. The plane lands, however, your problems don’t disappear. The hijacker simply threatens to blow up the plane, greatly damaging the tarmac on a major runway at a major airport, and stilll producing the same result as if the plane had stayed in the air - lots of people dead, a multimillion dollar loss to the airline, in both the cost of the plane and the loss of buisness. So, while this system may have actually be thought of in the post-9/11 ‘Guided missle plane’ hysteria, it wouldn’t function very well in reality, either as a deterent or a actual line of defense, EXCEPT in a situation extremely similar to 9/11 which, in all actuality, probably will never happen again.
-Drew K.
Problem is, by the time you are completely certain that the plane is, in fact, “aimed at a larger target,” it’s a bit too late to do anything about it.
What are you supposed to do? Take the hijackers’ word that they “only” want to make a political statement? If the hijackers are lying, you probably wouldn’t realize it until you looked out your window to see Sears Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge approaching at 500+ miles an hour.
The thing is, the problem can be solved much more easily. What’s wrong with armoring and locking the door to the cockpit? The point of an autoland system is that the terrorists couldn’t take over the plane if they get into the cockpit. Why not stop them a step sooner and prevent them from entering the cockpit?
Sure, they could threaten to kill people unless the pilot opens the door. But while we can’t rely on the passengers performing in any particular way, we can certainly train the pilots not to open the door for the terrorists, no matter what. After all, everyone on the plane is going to die if the terrorists get their hands on the controls, so the terrorist’s threat is not credible.
We’ve already implemented locked and armored cockpit doors. Therefore, the proposal to implement an autopilot function that can’t be turned off in case of emergencies or mechanical failure or accidental triggering means that planes will be less safe. What happens the first time the system goes off by accident?
Putting remote controls of airplanes is just going to lead to a rash of air traffic controller tower hijackings rather than airplane hijackings.
Putting weapons in the cabin or in the cockpit makes it easier to hijack a plane, not harder. If you give every passenger a gun, terrorists will just buy up enough seats so they outnumber the passengers. If you put a gun in the cockpit, terrorists will just recruit a flight attendant to snag it when he brings in drinks for the pilots.
P.S. If someone wanted to bomb an airport, they’d just park a car bomb outside the terminal and explode it there – no security evasion needed.
I understand your point, I just can’t believe that someone would be able to think, “Op, the planes been hijacked. I’d better crash it into the ground, killing my wife, family, and the rest of the passengers, and never know if i saved anyone, or merely completed the terrorists objectives for them.” Put in that position, I’d wait as long as possible before making such a decision.
-Drew K.
But you make it sound as if this is simply a binary option: sit tight and do what the hijackers want, or crash the plane.
As i suggested in my first post, crashing the plane might be a by-product of attempting to overpower the hijackers, but it wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) be the first aim of the passengers. Their first concern would be to try and take the plane back from the hijackers and keep on flying. And the extremely high likelihood that the passengers would do this, in my opinion, makes it extremely unlikely that anyone will try the old-fashioned method of hijacking a plane from now on.
You miss the point. Shagnasty’s device prevents a certain sort of hijacking. It does not merely provide a subsequent consequence of doing so (as the death penalty does). It is a deterrent in the sense that people won’t even bother to try hijacking if they know they simply cannot succeed.
I get the feeling that I could have come in here proposing a system where the plane could land itself in really bad weather. That would have really gotten people up in arms (until they found out that planes already have it and they may have been on a flight where it was used). Let’s not even get into what modern autopilots in general can do.
I agree. It seems people are arguing against technology that is already being used extensively rather than against whether the idea will actually work. It just seems to me that any potential hijacker would have to think twice about hijacking a plane that he couldn’t control. And if his plan was to blow the plane up, he’d do that in mid-air where he’d guarantee everyone was killed rather than on the ground where those in the further parts of the plane are likely to survive. This is assuming he doesn’t have a really big bomb, but then if I had a really big bomb I could think of a few more places I’d set it off that would kill more people and have a far less likelyhood of getting caught and not have to blow myself up in the process.
Well, it’s an option for newer airplanes, then. But you’re still going to have a sizable number of older jets still flying, unless you can retro-fit them. Which will make the airlines scream bloody murder about cost, but what can you do, right?
Standard cockpit equipment in the big jets.
I think a sufficient application of Og Smash! would do the job unless you have a 'hardened" system.
A terrorist attack doesn’t have to do extensive physical damage in order to terrorise.
Blowing up airplanes at altitude on a regular basis would seriously disrupt air commerce and thus a portion of the global economy. Whether that’s worth doing or not is another question.
Likewise, if it becomes a game of Russian roulette to get on a passenger jet folks will think twice (or more) about using them to go places.
Potential reasons for hijacking are more numerous than simply “Go to Cuba” or “Crash into building”.
Your argument is undercut by the fact that the reason it will probably never happen again is because the new default assuption upon which people will act is that hijacking = use of airplane as missile.
Well, I know very little about avionics, but I think then you would be proposing a system whereby a plane could automatically guide itself along a predefined optimum landing path with both the cockpit crew and the control tower watching it’s progress like hawks with their fingers hovering over various buttons labelled “give up and return to safe altitude” “let me fly the plane myself, you’re screwing it up” “scrub this attempt and try again” and whatever. Somewhat different from a “push this button to irrevocably commit to an automated landing no matter what other unforeseen circumstances might occur”.
I don’t really care if the autopilot works or not. First off, may I ask what rash of hijackings are prompting this debate? I’m no newshound, but I don’t know of any since 9/11, did I miss the boat?
Today, if a terrorist tries to take control of a plane, he gets beaten to death in the aisle. Tomorrow, he gets into the cockpit, because we all know the autopilot will keep us safe. Are YOU going to lay your life on the line when there is a foolproof backup system protecting you?
Today, when a terrorist threatens to kill someone if the cockpit isn’t opened, the pilot will tell him to get bent. Tomorrow, the cockpit door is opened because the autopilot will keep us safe. Would YOU risk the life of an innocent passenger when there is a foolproof backup system protecting you?
Any safety measure that will result in terrorist demands being met, and cockpit security breached, is not a safety measure. Too many bad things can happen if a terrorist gets control of the cockpit, I don’t care what autopilot system you have, it’s dangerous.
I’d rather put my safety in the hands of 100 passengers who also want to live, rather than in the hands of a computerized autopilot.
Why would a terrorist get on a plane in the first place if he couldn’t take it where he wanted to go? If he just wanted to blow the plane up then he doesn’t care if the thing has autopilot or not and the passengers are unlikely to stop him unless he is an idiot like that one guy trying to blow up his shoe.
I’d also assume this device isn’t in the cockpit. It would make sense to isolate the cockpit at that point and have this device buried in the bowels of the airplane so no matter what happens in the cockpit it wouldn’t affect the guiding of the plane.
Me, who flies over 100,000 miles a year, would like to relax in my nice comfy (as comfy as it gets on a plane) business/first seat and not worry about it. If I see some idiot trying to take over the plane that has this device on it I’ll assume that when he finds out he can’t do it then he will probably try to take himself out with as many passengers as possible and act accordingly. But if it keeps him off the plane, so much the better.
You know most plane accidents are pilot error not because HAL2000 decides to acts out his computerized fantasies.
They’re not getting on planes today, because they know they will be outnumbered 20 to 1, with no weapons, and no way to get into the cockpit. It’s already a non-starter of an idea, why rock the boat? Why introduce more complexity, more complacency and a system that can take control of the plane away from the pilot?
So, you route every single system that runs the plane through the cockpit, except that all of them also get routed elsewhere for this one autopilot function. I don’t see any problem with that, I’m sure it’ll be a quick retrofit.
Nice assumption. Before 9/11 we all assumed that hijackers wouldn’t just crash the plane, that didn’t work out too well. I prefer the assumption that if someone is trying to hijack the plane, they need to be stopped NOW, before they make any progress towards completing their plan.
And next time they may have smuggled a gun on board. Frankly, I don’t relish tackling some guy who has a gun and expecting a bunch of other half-asleep passengers to help me (see a smart terrorist would wait until most of the passengers were asleep before quietly taking over the plane). Eliminating the ability to take over the plane in any scenario would most likely eliminate this threat.
I don’t know the systems on a plane. Are all the computers that actually run the thing in the cockpit currently? And if they are do all the data/control system leads go directly to the cockpit, or do they go to data collection points before getting there. If not to either of these it should be a relatively easy retrofit.
I prefer they are stopped or deterred before they ever step foot on the plane myself before I have to hope Rambo is on the plane to take them out.
No. The difference is that the normal autoland system is under complete control of the pilots. If it’s not working properly they can, if all else fails, pull the circuit breakers to disengage the autopilot.
A modern autopilot does exactly what the pilots tell it to do, unless it is malfunctioning in which case the autopilot can be disconnected.
Your idea has the thing being switched on and then that’s it, everyone’s just along for the ride. That’s fine if it is a real hijack situation and the system was triggered intentionally, but what happens if the system is triggered unintentionally?
What happens when the autoland system, having been engaged at FL400, flies through very heavy icing conditions that jam the elevators. It can happen you know? Normally the pilots could turn the autopilot off, try and overpower the ice build up themselves, and if that didn’t work they can disconnect the elevators from each other in the hope that one of them is not jammed.
Your idea lacks failure protection. An aircraft system without failure protection is very dangerous.
It would HAVE to be able to be dissengaged by the pilots, and if the pilots can turn it off, so can the hijackers, making the system useless. That is why it is not a good idea.
I should not say that it is a bad idea, but rather, that the problems I mention are challenges that would need to be overcome before it would be viable.