BJCC, I know I tend to go on too long and bore people, but did you read my post past the first three sentences?
The woman with the bag in London was an incident stopped by El Al, which perfectly proves my point, thank you.
I tried to say, that the present procedures will not stop a determined hijacker(s), and there is no way to do so, since they can act without any weapons or using articles not banned (as did the 9/11 hijackers, etc) or provided by the airline itself (bottles, galley equipment).
I do not expect the simplistic attitudes of the public on a forum such as this, and it is a disappointment when so many buy into the garbage being fed to them by the authorities. Laws only apply to honest persons, they do not apply to criminals (and especially terrorists) so all the screening and hassling and inconvenience will not stop those people, it will, by distracting the airport staff, make it easier for them to slip through. There are not many terrorist attacks on airplanes, the majority of incidents are drunk, crazy or stupid people acting up. Terrorists do not seem to be targeting airplanes right now, but not because they are afraid of security at airports. Read a little about the 9/11 attack and see how long that took to plan, and how easy it would have been to stop it before it happened if only someone had connected the dots.
Pilots had been trained (and probably are still trained) to cooperate with hijackers, which included opening the door to them on demand. If they had known of the threat to use the airplanes as missiles, and that the hijackers had pilots in their group, the doors would not have been opened and the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon would not have happened. Simple problem, simple fix. Instead, the authorities have seen and seized the opportunity to grab more power.
Now they have expanded the military (and its budget) enormously, gone to war with anyone who does not agree with them, created new, huge, government departments (Homeland Security, TSA, etc), expanded all areas of surveillance and taken away our rights and freedoms with impunity and hardly a peep from us. And again I repeat: all this will not stop a determined hijacker.
Benjamin Franklin saw this coming.