During the holiday season, it is really the season for hastling travelers at our airports. As a pilot and world traveler, I have been following this whole airport security business like most everyone else. The difference with me is that I look at things differently. You first have to ask and answer the question of, "why are we being hastled in the first place?". Until we do that, we can not move to the second phase and that is what should we do? Well, here goes.
For many years the reason that we checked passengers before they go onto planes was to be sure they were paying customers. Once they were on the plane, it was too expensive to turn around and take them back and we all know that you can't just dump them off. The other reason was to prevent problems on the landing end where people who did not have the correct documents created problems. If the airplane company did not take care of the problem on the other end, the host country could not allow their plane to land. That is about all the problems that we had. They used to check you health certificate to make sure you did not have small pox or some other decease. When a more serious health problem came along like AIDS, they got rid of the health cards because they did not want to hurt the feelings of queers who were the major carrier of AIDS at the time. I am just pointing out some of the history.
I used to fly over and around Cuba a lot back in the 60's and 70's where there were a lot of high jackings. They would check passengers for guns, but it seemed that the only ones who had the guns were the high jackers and they did not catch very many before were able to get on. I worked with one guy who I will not name who was on two planes that were high jacked to Cuba and another guy I worked with had is whole family high jacked there. No body got hurt, so I guess that is why not too much was done about it. I think that the final thing that ended it was that Cuba started arresting the high jackers and throwing them into jail and we did the same thing. High Jackers did not want to go to jail or die, but it is different with Muslim high jackers today. They all seem to want to die.
Now let us ask, "what is exactly the reason we had the 9/11 episode and how we could have prevented it". In the old days, did you ever notice that just before landing they opened the door to the cockpit or drew back the curtains? I never could figure out why they did that. Now why is this a big deal? Before 9/11, cockpits had light weight doors if they had doors at all. This allowed the high jackers to get into the cockpit and take over control. If we had stronger locked doors on the cockpit, the only people who would have been killed were just those on the plane if any at all. I think that it would have been almost impossible for the high jackers to bring down the plane by anything that they could do back in the passenger section. In the case of 9/11 all the passengers were killed and if they had stronger doors, most would still be alive today and no one on the ground would have been killed.
If the pilots were in control of the plane, they could make life very difficult for anyone who was out of their seats. I am not an acrobatic pilot, but I have friends who are and have flown with them. I can tell you that if you do not have lap and shoulder belts, you will be thrown all over the place. This would have given time for the pilot to explain what to do to over power the high jackers. Since their lives would have been at stake, I am sure many cowards would have become heroes. See, it would not have been that difficult to have prevented 9/11, but what have we done?
We have taken our law abiding citizens and subjected them to all kinds of abuse in the name of protecting them when all we needed to do was to fix the doors on the cockpit. Wait, what if they threatened to kill a passenger? Just let them kill them. It would be better than letting the high jackers kill everyone on the plane and people on the ground too. I think it would turn out like high jacking to Cuba. After a while, they would run out of stupid Muslims and the problem would be over. If some crazed Muslim wants to kill a lot of people, there are much better ways than high jacking planes.
It just happens that I have a horse in my barn right now and when he gets out, the one thing that I do not do is to go out to the barn and "close the door". It seems that we are doing just that and at great expense to everyone. What I might do is to "fix the barn door"!!!!
