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Comment by meghan_rain | Hacker News Reader

Right, but to their defense, there have not been 9/11 attacks or anything remotely similar since 9/11... so either it was all fake anyways or the security theater also deters potential low IQ attackers?

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My snark aside, you’re missing a totally other reasonable explanation. Prior to 9/11 hijackings were relatively safe affairs. They would land and negotiate for money / demands and release passengers unharmed. So sitting passively was the safest approach, Post 9/11 the cockpit is completely locked down (regulatory requirement for flights to/from US) and passengers know that any hijacking might be a suicide attacker and thus won’t sit passively. See underwear and shoe bombers as examples where bomb materials got through security but passengers subdued the attacker. That’s why US Marshals stopped flying. Attacks are too rare to warrant meaningful useful security on even a small fraction of flights.

Now arguably those were international flights into the US. You could argue that security was lax abroad but generally TSA regulations and technical requirements apply to security screenings for inbound flights so there’s not any particular reason to believe that the TSA would have done a better job.

Don't worry, the TSA has inserted itself into overseas airports too.

When travelling to the US we get subjected to random/targeted searches in the gating area by US TSA staff before being allowed to board.

This is after our own typical screening and scanning.

The biggest thing that stopped 9/11 attacks since 9/11 was locks on cockpit doors.

The second biggest thing that stopped them since 9/11 is passenger awareness that they could just... Not let a few assholes with boxcutters fly a plane into a building.

Recognising that domestic flights also need security and not treating them like flying Greyhound buses probably helped.

After 9/11 people are not going to let hijackers run the plane. They may hurt you in retaking the plane, but if they fly it into a building you'll be dead for sure.

Since mid-morning on 9/11, in fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93

There also wasn’t a 9/11 before the 9/11.

There were dozens of terror attacks against air travel in the 80s and 90s. The global post-9/11 "security theater" did make flying in the developing world much safer.

Really? So that’s attributable to us not carrying bottles of water and to us taking our shoes off?

Yes, everyone knows that terrorists can't take off their shoes.

There's been dozens of hijackings since 9/11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#20...

To be fair there's been a lot less hijackings in the 2000s and 2010s compared with previous decades - although as the decline started in the 90's - its not likely to be solely due to increased security.

It has to do with several things, among them you have:

- the end of the cold war, with the clear hegemony of the US which halted state-sponsored terrorism from unaligned-but-socialist-minded countries (especially Libya)

- targeted assassination of terrorist leaders and infrastructures (no more training summer camps) no matter the country they are in (mostly through drones nowadays), leading to a progressive reduction in sophistication in terror attacks committed, and the rise of lone wolfs instead of structured terrorist commandos.

It's completely due to prior to 9/11 you left the hijackers alone and they would land the plane, get arrested or die in a shootout with the police.

Now if you attempt to hijack a plane 100-300 passengers will beat your ASS and stop you before you get anywhere near control of the aircraft.

There will never be another hijacking attack where the pilot loses control of the plane from a threat of a would be hijacker.

That lists twenty, and the minimum to be "dozens" would be 24.

Grammatically, 1.5 donut is wrong and 1.5 donuts is correct. So, in this case "1.66~ dozens" (because 20 / 12 = 1.66~) is pedantically correct.

(...But logically and intuitively everything I just said is extremely stupid because by that logic 12.01 counts as "dozens" and that's ridiculous, so your complaint is absolutely correct and I agree with you 100%)

Grammatically, 0.2 donut is wrong also. So by that logic, 0.01 also counts as dozens.

I'd argue that "dozens" obviously means there are a multiple of 12.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hijackings occurred, on average, once every five days globally.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-ai...

I always attributed that to:

  - before 9/11, the advice was: sit down in your seat and wait for the ransom demands

  - after 9/11: fight for your life now or die in a blaze of fire

Hijackers must feel this too. No quarter will be given.

Wasn't that a contributing factor to UA93 being "unsuccessful"? The passengers had gotten word of the other three flights, and stopped being quite as compliant (though "compliant" is obviously not the full story for the other three flights).

Yes! Without this incident, I wouldn't be as optimistic about people fighting back. Turns out, people can be pretty rational after all.

The TSA checks are ineffective, they fail detection 95% of the time [1]. That's a pretty good indication that it's security theater.

Personally, I'd expect the decrease to be mostly attributable to increased cockpit access security like locked reinforced doors.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...

Securing cockpit doors is what prevents the next 9/11. It was both necessary and sufficient.

Securing cockpit doors contributed to the death of 150 people however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

> Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, Lubitz locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft hit a mountainside.

Yes. Did they fix the doors/protocol in the meantime?

You aren’t supposed to let a pilot be alone in the cockpit and they violated protocol when this happened. 2 authorized personnel should be in the cockpit at all times but German airlines dropped the rule.

I'm not an expert, but the Wikipedia article sounds like this protocol was implemented after the Germanwings crash:

> In response to the incident and the circumstances of the co-pilot's involvement, aviation authorities in some countries implemented new regulations that require the presence of two authorised personnel in the cockpit at all times. Three days after the incident, the European Aviation Safety Agency issued a temporary recommendation for airlines to ensure that at least two crew members—including at least one pilot—were in the cockpit for the entire duration of the flight. Several airlines announced that they had already adopted similar policies voluntarily. But by 2016, the EASA stopped recommending the two-person rule, instead advising airlines to perform a risk assessment and decide for themselves whether to implement it. Germanwings and other German airlines dropped the procedure in 2017.

I guess the underlying assumption is that the regular medical tests that pilots are subjected to should keep pilots capable of mass murder-suicide out of a cockpit. Indeed, Lubitz had been declared "unfit for work" by a doctor, but apparently the doctor trusted Lubitz himself to pass this on to his employer, because "medical secrecy requirements prevented his physician from making this information available to Germanwings".

Securing the doors allowed the Germanwings flight 9525 massacre to be carried out and potentially Malaysian Airlines flight 370 too.

No, what allowed that was them not requiring two people to be on the flight deck. That’s insane to me (and doesn’t happen in the US which customarily has a two person rule, which I believe is defined in Part 121, but still trying to find it).

That wouldn’t matter at all if not for the locking down the cockpit.

That’s like saying seat belts wouldn’t be needed if the car didn’t move, no?

The end of 9/11 happening again occured right in the middle of 9/11, with UAL 93.

Passengers figure out it's not a hijacking they might survive, and that you're going to crash the plane into a valuable target. Then, having nothing to lose, they revolt and ruin your plan.

So that particular type of plan isn't going to work again. Passengers no longer assume "hijacking I might survive".

I am also not aware, in the history of aviation, of a terrorist attack that was stopped at an airport security check.

Here's one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair

Though it was the airline's own additional airport security check rather than the security checkpoint.

Edit: <not worth engaging>

This is a meme that gets repeated often, always with no source. I bet you heard this from someone repeating it exactly in this same context too, complaining about security theater.

Not everything in life (in fact, almost nothing) can be “proved” by a “source”. Human emergent behavior can be observed and reported on in this way, perhaps.

But questions like “why aren’t more people sacrificing their lives to hijack or destroy airplanes for the last 20 years” are not answerable by “sources”.

Do you have some reason to think a different posture towards hijackers and better security around cockpits didn’t have a strong effect on would-be hijackers’ willingness to give their lives to a violent political statement?

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