I blogged on 9/11 before, but as I watch the news on TV about what is going on in our airports I can only conclude that there is no limit to our "Stupidity". Here is where I am coming from. I am a pilot, have my own plane and air strip. I used to teach Decision Theory at a major university. I worked with a guy who was high jacked to Cuba twice and an other guy whose wife and family were high jacked to Cuba. On that basis, I think that I have some right to comment on what is going on at our airports every day.
Based on the 9/11 event, and our desire to prevent future such events, what should we do? Let me start with a few numbers. A total of four planes were high jacked. All the passengers were killed at about 100 each. Three of the planes hit targets on the ground killing about 2,600 more people for a grand total of about 3,000. This leads to the question of, "What should we do to prevent this type of thing happening in the future." Notice that I did not use the term "ever" or "for ever". You must know that "for ever" is a very long time as is "never". There are a lot of alternatives actions or decision that we could take and my blog is about which ones we should take. We could eliminate air travel and this would clearly solve the problem, but it would be an unacceptable solution. Spending "all" of our tax money to solve the problem is also an unacceptable solution. It is clear that the solution is to spend a limited amount of tax money and keep air travel. Now let's move on.
First, let's look at the 3,000 people who died. I am not going to consider the property damage here. The key aspect of all decision making is the, "choice between alternatives". If you have an exhaustive list of all the possible alternatives, then by definition the "best" one is some place on that list. The only problem is to figure out which one it is. It may also be a combination of the individual alternatives too. I am not going to develop that "exhaustive list" here, but I think you follow the process.
Next, let's look at the key elements of 9/11. Some of the high jackers knew how to fly the planes. They boarded the planes with "box cutter" knives. They took over the planes and got into the cockpits. I think these are the main elements. It took "all" of these elements together to pull off 9/11. If any one of these could have been prevented, 9/11 would never have happened. Does that seem logical? Now let's take them one at a time.
How about the fact that some of the high jackers know how to fly the plane? Do you know of a way that this could have been prevented? I am a pilot and I do not. The high jackers could have learned to fly inside or outside the USA. They could have also learned how to fly those planes on a simulator like the one you can buy from Microsoft for $49.00. I have the program and have flown those same planes and also tried my hand at doing an emergency landing in the Hudson River. Do you agree that making all flight schools check the names of students against the "terrorist list" is worthless? I had to show my passport to my instructor. Why are we spending tax money on this? Just a simple case of stupidity.
Next, what about the "box cutters"? This is a little knife with a razor sharp blade that sticks out about 1". These knives were detected by the scanners, but the rules at the time allowed knives to go thru that had blades less than 3" long. The idea of the rule was to prevent "stabbing" with a knife, but did not consider throat slashing with a 1" razor sharp "box cutter". Could we have done something here to have prevented the "box cutter" from getting on the plane? Change the rule that "knives" of any kind not be allowed on board. Simple and what did it cost? One telephone call. So far we have only gotten rid of one of the keys to the 9/11 high jacking. There are still other ways that the high jackers could have taken control without the use of knives. How about a belt around the neck of a flight attendant or one of the pilots. I think that you could come up with some more. I have hammered nails with the heel of my shoe. How about using a shoe? See where I am going with this? We could make it a little more difficult, but we could not prevent passengers from taking over.
Next, the high jackers took over the cockpit and then were able to fly the plane where they wanted. Did you ever notice that prior to 9/11 that you could look down the aisle into the cockpit. In many cases they only had a shower curtain between the cockpit and the passenger cabin. Some had doors made just like those to the rest room on the plane. The bottom line is that they had no affective door. Anyone could kick in the door and in the case of 9/11, that is exactly what happened. Now what if we had planes with secure doors that high jackers could not get thru? The high jackers could never get control of the plane. They could kill or injure a few of the passengers, but could not do any major damage to anything on the ground. This one thing would have prevented the death of 2,600 people on the ground at a very reasonable one time cost. We still have to figure out how we are going to save the other 400 who died on the planes.
So far we have only had to make "one" phone call about the knives and a second to require planes to have secure and locked doors to the cockpit. We save all people on the ground with just these two actions. Now the people on the plane. We post a sign on each plane that if high jacked, it is upto the passengers to protect themselves. In the case of 9/11, most passengers just sat there and waited to be "gassed". I don't think that there is any way that a couple of terrorists could kill all the people on a plane if the people knew that it was upto them to protect themselves. To improve the odds a little more, I would have the pilot turn off the oxygen. The people would all go to sleep in about a minute if they were not in their seats with their masks on. If that were not enough, I would ask the pilot to make it a little more intersting in back by doing a frew stunts with the plane. Again, anyone not strapped in would have a real head ache.
Now, you ask about the strip search guys at the boarding gates. I would get rid of them and profile passengers and take a few out for a pat down. My system would send a lot of government union employees home looking for a real job. I would eliminate the long lines and long waits at the airports and we would all be a lot happier and just as safe.
