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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of an "at your own risk" option, but it'll never happen. Since 9/11, a large part of the purpose of airport security is to protect uninvolved people on the ground (or at least in tall buildings), not just passengers. We can certainly debate whether that's necessary or useful (I'd argue that we could do far less than we currently do), but I don't think you'll ever get the public to agree to allowing airline flights with no security screening, even if you can convince everyone to take a libertarian approach to it.

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a large part of the purpose of airport security is to protect uninvolved people on the ground

This was solved when they locked the cockpit doors. Every other airport security restriction has been an overreaction in my opinion.

I think you may be right. However, you'd have to convince the public (or at least Congress) before you could have "security free" flights even with secure cockpits.

We have "security free" flights today. The only difference is we will no longer have to wait in line.

There are also airplane bombings, weapon and drug smuggling, human trafficking.

To protect those on the ground, part of the option could be acknowledging that the military can take out your plane if it's hijacked.

That's far from guaranteed to work. And are you going to be paying for the F-16s on hot standby around the country?

Unless you don't live in USA or you don't pay your taxes, you already pay for it -- a.k.a Norad.

Besides, since 911 the doors of plane cockpits are almost like a bank vault.

Yes, even to the point of locking out the co-pilot for a suicide mission.

Europe didn't (doesn't?) have the 2 person rule like the US does.

Paying for some F-16s on standby at certain points around the country seems reasonable to me. I mean, the TSA costs us ~7 billion a year anyways.

I agree, but if some people are going to cause a disproportionate need for them, then those people should pay for it more than the rest.

Really, though, that was more of a glib remark. The more salient point IMO is the fact that the military is far from guaranteed to succeed in bringing down a hijacked airliner before it hits its target, or without killing other people on the ground.

This already happens. WADS, EADS, etc.

> To protect those on the ground, part of the option could be acknowledging that the military can take out your plane if it's hijacked.

Destroying an aircraft over potentially populated areas can be useful to shift who and how many people are at risk when it hits the ground, but its not really (even if you can reliably destroy it when you need to, which -- absent a highly-reliable remote destruct device built into the plane [0], is hard to guarantee) a great way to "protect those on the ground". Because the wreckage is going to hit somewhere, and you don't really have precision control of that.

[0] which raises its own problems, of course

At least you can prevent the wreckage from landing in the side of a building with controlled demolition charges in it.

Look at the timeline of the 9/11 attacks:<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_for_the_day_of_the_Se....

Flight 11 was crashed 30 minutes after hijacking, 175 20 minutes, 77 about 45 minutes, and 93 about 35 minutes later. Even if you tighten the loop between a hijacking and getting a fighter jet in the air to counter it, it will still take you about 15 minutes at best to do it.

Then you're left with the problem of figuring out which one of the contacts on your military radar doesn't have a transponder. Go to a map like <https://flightaware.com/live/> and observe the Ohio/Pennsylvania airspace in the middle of the day. You have 15 minutes to figure out the hijacked flight, guess its flight path, and then order fighters to intercept it and shoot it down.

Quite frankly, if a plane gets hijacked in the Northeast, there is no way you can get a military jet to shoot it down in time.

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