Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Seems like we could very safely abolish the air marshal program. It may have been useful pre-9/11 but Flight 93 seems to prove that it's not necessary anymore.

Anyone attempting to hijack a flight full of Americans is going to be attacked every single time, and terrorists surely know this, and that's the real deterrent. Hijackers might think they can overpower a single armed officer but they know they can't overpower dozens of passengers that feel forced to fight or die.

It might even be a good idea for pre-flight training videos to explicitly tell passengers to immediately attack anyone attempting to hijack the plane. Though this is probably unnecessary, it could act as a strong additional deterrent and help coordinate people in the event.

View on HN

> It might even be a good idea for pre-flight training videos to explicitly tell passengers to immediately attack anyone attempting to hijack the plane.

You'll have a lot of passengers attacking each other for no reason. This is a remarkably bad idea.

Fact is: plane hijackings isn't really a problem anywhere. Low-tech solutions like locking the cockpit goes very far.

Stopping those really determined is probably hard/impossible, the best tools is probably old school humint.

But it's probably best to accept that attacks are not impossible. Spend the money on something else.

> You'll have a lot of passengers attacking each other for no reason. This is a remarkably bad idea.

Why are people going to attack each other for no reason? Hijackers typically do very obvious things, like try to break into the cockpit and make announcements/threats to the passengers.

The training video could tell passengers to attack anyone trying to break into the cockpit or to wait to attack until the pilot instructs them to, etc. It would take a bit of thought for sure.

> Fact is: plane hijackings isn't really a problem anywhere. Low-tech solutions like locking the cockpit goes very far.

They're not a problem since 9/11 when passengers attacked the hijackers and then cockpit doors were reinforced. I believe the deterrent is the combination of these two changes.

> Why are people going to attack each other for no reason? Hijackers typically do very obvious things,

Given that passengers have suspected terrorism from such things as speaking Arabic [1] and doing math [2] I wouldn't recommend gambling on the smarts of the dumbest person on a given flight.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/16/southwest-ai... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/05/07/iv...

You're not gambling on the dumbest person. You're gambling on the collective intelligence of dozens or hundreds of people, in coordination with a trained flight crew with access to cameras, radios, etc.

Tens of millions of people have flown without incident and you can point to two people panicking over stupid things? That seems like strong evidence against what you're claiming. People are simply not as stupid as you seem to think.

> You're not gambling on the dumbest person. You're gambling on the collective intelligence of dozens or hundreds of people

I'd say that's worse. Mobs are usually way dumber than individuals.

You cut off half of the sentence to quote it out of context...

And if you're right, why aren't mobs of Americans attacking suspected hijackers already? Why didn't passengers attack the guy speaking Arabic or doing math? The evidence, based on millions of successful flights, seems conclusive: people are just not this stupid.

> I believe the deterrent is the combination of these two changes.

Yep. Pre-9/11, if your plane was hijacked, odds were that you would get out alive. Once 9/11 introduced the world to the suicide hijacker, that basically stopped hijackings. Passengers will simply overwhelm anyone trying to take over the plane because everyone assumes it's a suicide mission.

You basically can't break into the cockpit anymore.

A team of hijackers could almost certain break the cockpit door given sufficient time (maybe hours) of unfettered access to do so.

Unless they were somehow able to keep the pilots completely unaware of what's going on, that wouldn't work. It's a pretty extreme response, and would risk passengers (assuming they're still alive), but depressurizing the cabin would pretty quickly stop any attempts to break into the cockpit.

Even if attackers could get to supplemental oxygen in time, those little bottles don't last forever, and there'd be an opportunity for crew and passengers to regain control.

I think there are other last-resort actions pilots could take to thwart a takeover, like engaging in extreme attitude/altitude changes in order to knock out the attackers.

Remember, we're operating under the assumption that if the hijackers win, everyone on the plane is likely dead anyway, so putting passengers at risk to stop them should be considered acceptable. The only way attackers can realistically win is if a pilot is duped into letting them into the cockpit. Not impossible, but that reduces the possibilities quite a lot.

They would require a lot of tools that would be difficult (not impossible, TSA is garbage) to smuggle onto the plane.

Smuggled tools, some kind of creative solution using onboard materials, a weakness they've discovered, etc.

In order words, its not safe to assume a team of intelligent and motivated hijackers couldn't break into a cockpit given sufficient time. But it is safe to assume that the reinforced cockpit door will slow hijackers enough that passengers have time to stop them.

Unless over the middle of the ocean, most flights are probably close enough to an emergency diversion landing that "sufficient time" would be unlikely.

Hopefully, yes, but we can't just ignore the tens of thousands of flights flying 2-3-4 hours from the nearest airport every year. Particularly because these are the biggest airplanes with the most passengers.

> attack until the pilot instructs them to...

Woah, that's... a bad idea.

> Flight 93 seems to prove that it's not necessary anymore

That flight crashed killing everyone on board.

The lesson about consequences of letting your plane be hijacked was learned and applied in less than two hours.

Nobody on that flight made it to their intended destination, including the hijackers. Now that it is known that passengers will attack would be hijackers and that cockpit doors will be locked, making it hard to get control of the plane, the risk/reward for hijacking looks poor. That shooting down hijacked flights was authorized may also be a deterent, altough realistic response time is long, so maybe not a big factor. Terrorists are better off doing something else.

Locking the flight deck door, like the terrorists did, has probably been the biggest security upgrade since that day.

There have been multiple cases of "suicide by jet airliner" where the pilot waits until they are alone in the cockpit, then locks the door, and kills everyone on board by crashing the plane. They were overseas, with overseas airlines.

Anyway, the door isn't a panacea.

To my knowledge, there is no panacea for human security on airlines, or anywhere ever. My point is locking the door would have likely stopped all 9/11 hijackings and maybe others where the hijacker took over the cockpit.

I've been especially interested in aviation recently, but I think I will pick up the hijacking dangers portion down the road.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com