Originally Posted by
silverstrata
The cockpit door policy post 9-11 was not fully thought through, as we can all see. (Some of us did warn the authorities.) So why rush in with new proposals, when these new ideas are equally fraught with unintended consequences?
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That is what the CAA and various airlines are proposing. Is this sensible? Has anyone thought this through?
Reading this thread, I find one of the most confusing things to be posts like this which imply that these are "new proposals" or untried / untested knee-jerk responses with no track record. This is simply not the case. As SLF, flying rarely since 9/11 (although not for that reason - other life changes) I have seen this procedure in operation multiple times, in Europe, and on multiple different airlines. In fact, I hadn't realised it was not regulation (as it appears it was/is in the US).
What the authorities are doing is simply asking _all_ airlines to implement a procedure that has already been in widespread use, as long as the locked door, in a large number of airlines all round the world - just not _your_ airline.
All safety measures have some risk of unintended adverse consequences in some situations, the aim has to be to ensure this risk is low in comparison to what you are trying to prevent. As with the locked door, we can only quantify one side of those risks, because we will never know how many adverse events have been deterred by the measure, however after over a decade and millions of flight hours in use we can definitely _quantify_ the risk of adverse consequences. We know the risks of the locked door, not from hypotheticals but from real events on record, the same should be true of this procedure. There are also more cabin crew than pilots, and if as you say they are less well vetted then there should be many more incidents of rogue cabin crew than rogue pilots. We can definitely quantify the rogue pilots from the record (it's not just this one), so you should be able to stop talking hypotheticals and start talking actual events or stats...
PS: Meanwhile, I would be very interested to know how you are getting your beverages for the flight through security - 100ml can't possibly be enough, and you can't be getting them from those "recruit anyone from the streets, give them a few weeks training" cabin crew, can you ? I don't want to stoke paranoia, but for a pre-meditated incapacitation what do you think the easiest, most common choice would be, roofie or fire-axe ?