> For example screening for knives is useless because anyone can make a shiv in an airport bathroom the same way prisoners do.
I'd never really thought about shivs before, but I've always felt that the available materials in duty free (after security) must be more than sufficient to blow a hole in the side of a plane (lots of aerosols etc)?
I guess the additional danger comes with a plane lands somewhere and a train has far less potential to cause massive collateral damage. However looking at the tube bombings in London it is clearly possible to make a decent fist of terror using trains.
>The main reason there haven't been any repeats of 9/11 is that as of 9/11 all passengers are on notice that resisting hijackers is mandatory, and even a terrorist with a knife can't fend off 100 passengers at once.
I disagree. The changes to cockpit doors are far far more relevant, it's simply not practical to take control of a plane through threat of violence (plus all pilots are now aware they won't necessarily be hostages - they'll be weapons). Yes a bladed weapon will only let you harm a small number of passengers before being overwhelmed - but a couple of guns probably achieves the same. The clear difference being the chance of depressurising the cabin.
> I'd never really thought about shivs before, but I've always felt that the available materials in duty free (after security) must be more than sufficient to blow a hole in the side of a plane (lots of aerosols etc)?
The reason explosives are only a minor threat to planes isn't that it would be hard to get one through, it's that the threat it poses isn't specific to planes.
> I guess the additional danger comes with a plane lands somewhere and a train has far less potential to cause massive collateral damage.
That isn't much of an attack vector when you can't choose the target. Nearly all of "somewhere" is bodies of water and open space.
> However looking at the tube bombings in London it is clearly possible to make a decent fist of terror using trains.
It's not about trains either. Someone could drive a car bomb into a nightclub.
A lot of the smaller attacks that have actually happened would have been dramatically worse if we hadn't lucked into the fact that the terrorists were incompetent. Although there may be a shared causation in that correlation.
> The changes to cockpit doors are far far more relevant, it's simply not practical to take control of a plane through threat of violence
Those are also a help, though somewhat of a risk too if a terrorist actually managed to get into the cockpit.
> Yes a bladed weapon will only let you harm a small number of passengers before being overwhelmed - but a couple of guns probably achieves the same. The clear difference being the chance of depressurising the cabin.
That changes nothing. Given the choice between certain death or likely death while saving a thousand people on the ground, the decision remains clear.
I'd never really thought about shivs before, but I've always felt that the available materials in duty free (after security) must be more than sufficient to blow a hole in the side of a plane (lots of aerosols etc)?
I guess the additional danger comes with a plane lands somewhere and a train has far less potential to cause massive collateral damage. However looking at the tube bombings in London it is clearly possible to make a decent fist of terror using trains.
>The main reason there haven't been any repeats of 9/11 is that as of 9/11 all passengers are on notice that resisting hijackers is mandatory, and even a terrorist with a knife can't fend off 100 passengers at once.
I disagree. The changes to cockpit doors are far far more relevant, it's simply not practical to take control of a plane through threat of violence (plus all pilots are now aware they won't necessarily be hostages - they'll be weapons). Yes a bladed weapon will only let you harm a small number of passengers before being overwhelmed - but a couple of guns probably achieves the same. The clear difference being the chance of depressurising the cabin.