Anyway, the door are a definate improvement over the old wafer thin composite doors and serve their purpose as both a deterrent and making the occupants feel secure.
Well, it looks like the terrorists have won then. If some of you feel so insecure that you need that expensive new bullet-proof door just to feel secure then perhaps you should find a job with the bureaucrats who make some of the stupid descisions in the first place.
Those new doors and the ill thought out policies behind them will be the cause of severe problems for this industry in the next 10-15 years. Already the numbers of people who want to become airline pilots is reducing and the inability to allow youngsters to visit the flightdeck will have a long term effect on the numbers of kids who will want to do a job where you are locked away in a cubicle for hours on end.
Our job as pilots involves risk management. Every time we land our a/c we are managing some elements of risk. The risk of being attacked on the flight deck compared to the risks we undertake when landing the a/c show how much wasted effort is being put on these new doors and the regulations surrounding them. The overall effect is cosmetic and designed to show the travelling public that something is being done about security even though it is not the solution but a knee jerk reaction. As has been pointed out in other posts, as long as that door has to be opened any time in flight then its purpose and usefulness has been totally negated.
It saddens me to read of people who are going to work and they feel insecure or frightened and that somehow these new security doors are somehow going to be the magic solution. If only half the effort and money being spent on the 'doors' soultion was put into better intelligence gathering, training of able-bodied and educated security staff at the airports with intelligent profiling of pax we probably wouldn't have to suffer the sad spectacle of 'frightened' pilots worrying about their security.
What next? A permanently bolted door with a slot in it for food trays and plastic bottles for physiological relief? Until someone gets realistic and applies common sense to the risk involved we will continue to be subjected to solutions based on hype with cosmetic eye candy designed to calm pax who are largely ignorant of the risk management we deal with every working day. The odds of you winning the lottery are better than those of being involved in a flight where someone will attempt to enter the flight deck with the intnention of taking over control of the a/c. In fact, the effort put into preventing CFIT, which has a much higher risk of happening than forced entry into the flightdeck, just goes to show how fcuked up the authorities and the bureaucrats have got it. Risk management... I don't think so.
