It is said that the military are always preparing to fight the previous war. And when the new one turns out to be very different, they of course get into trouble.
I'm very concerned that the same problem will happen with airline security. All kinds of measures will be taken to prevent an exact repetition of Tuesday's massacre -- and then we'll all be taken by surprise when terrorists do something different. Just like we were this time. We tried to prevent people getting bombs or firearms on board; they didn't bring any. Procedures were geared to the hostage-taking scenario, but this was very different. Unfortunately, terrorists have proven to be imaginative as well as cold-blooded murderers.
The other thing we need to be careful of is not to make other problems worse by 'solving' one problem.
Shooting down hijacked airliners? Hostage-taking will likely remain the main scenario in hijackings -- fortunately, suicidal mass murderers are less common than mass murderers who want to stay alive. Shooting down every hijacked airliner may well kill many people that might be saved. Airliners also can have other problems, such as radio and instrument failures. Imagine an airliner with such a failure, whose route happens to be taking it toward an urban area (quite likely -- that's where airports are). Do we blow it out of the sky? And if you think that's far-fetched, recall the shootdown of the Iran Air A300 in 1988. It didn't even have a radio failure, it was just talking on a different frequency. And it wasn't even off course. Which didn't stop the people manning one of the most sophisticated bits of electronics of the time from interpreting it to be hostile and shooting it down.
Making access to cockpit impossible in flight? Then say goodbye to the pilot who operated the throttles of the Sioux City DC-10 -- a dead-heading pilot who had been sitting in the main cabin and came forward to help the crew when they lost all hydraulics. To the extent that anyone flew that plane, he did.
I don't claim to have the solution. But I do want to warn against over-reacting, or against imagining that our greatest danger at this point is an exact repetition of Tuesday.
[ 16 September 2001: Message edited by: spagiola ]