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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

This seems reductive. For everything TSA misses they've caught plenty of other weapons that have no place in the cabin of an aircraft. No security can be perfect, so tradeoffs are inevitable. We can disagree about the thresholds, but it's not just theater.

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But it's not the TSA's job to prevent murders in the air. (We already had a service specifically for that — the Air Marshals!)

The TSA's only job is to prevent planes from being hijacked or destroyed in a way that results in massive collateral damage.

And as the GP says, if you can't get in the cockpit, there become relatively few ways of doing this. (And the ways that do remain — e.g. binary explosives — are addressed by the more-limited carry-on regulations and security checks that every country does, and which the US already did before the TSA.)

An air marshall on a flight has one gun. If a determined group could reliably bring multiple guns into the cabin they're much more likely to overpower the marshall. From there they could open exterior doors and throw debris into the engines. Or perhaps their weapons could breach even armored cockpit doors.

Obviously the solution is just to allow concealed carry on planes and let law abiding citizens defend themselves, and keep the cockpit locked. Yee-haw!

It’s a plug door, you can’t open it at altitude.

Also, throwing debris into the engines would just result in an emergency landing.

The TSA is ridiculous and there isn’t a need to try to contrive examples to justify what they could prevent outside of hijacking.

If their goal was to prevent killing just a plane load of people, they would have to setup perimeters far around the airport to prevent people with a 50 caliber rifle from shooting up the cockpit during takeoff roll.

They would also need to block private air access to the airport because someone could just drive a truck of explosives underneath a plane load of people taxiing.

Put differently, it their job was just mass casualty prevention in transit caused by other people, they would need to be near every bus station, controlling road access near buses, guarding all railroad tracks with passenger routes, etc.

TSA lines are an obvious soft target and if someone wanted to take a lot of people with them, they could just use a suicide vest in the security lines. It would have the same chilling effects on the air travel economy and spread terror.

Yep - and it has been done already [0]. Stadiums, malls, and water supplies are other extremely soft targets. I tend to consider TSA to be 'make work' at this point...

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domodedovo_International_Airpo...

I would hypothesize that the goal isn't preventing mass casualties, but rather preventing mass casualties that shift popular sentiment toward making war with certain countries. (The government calls these acts "terrorism", but citizens being afraid isn't quite what they have a problem with!)

The US government doesn't want a repeat of Sept 11. By which I don't mean "planes crashing into buildings"; but rather "operatives of some other country doing something on US soil, that results in US citizens becoming enraged-enough toward a particular other country, that — sensible realpolitik or not — any president that didn't declare war with that country, would be immediately impeached and replaced with one that would."

The US government, despite being a nominal democracy, wants to "the head to control the heart" when it comes to deciding when to go to war — because the heart is very easy to manipulate, and because there are always tons of realpolitik things going on that the heart knows nothing about.

I would guess that the government thinks that US citizens won't get too angry if terrorists bomb a bus, or a plane taking off/landing, or a line full of people. All these things are bad, but they don't strike me as being offensive to the American spirit.

The TSA, meanwhile, is very concerned about the airspace above... football stadiums. Which tells you about their thinking re: what would "offend the American spirit."

> throw debris into the engines

Good luck with throwing debris into a 400 mph wind at -30F while passing out from lack of oxygen.

Yup, and also not getting sucked out the door if you were able to open it (which you couldn't at cabin pressure anyway).

Burt Berlin, my mentor at Boeing, got his start working on the B47 (first jet bomber). They discovered that the pilot could not bail out into the wind stream, the force would just push him back in. Hence the development of the ejection seat to force him out.

I'm getting the impression you don't know much about aviation.

"For everything TSA misses they've caught plenty of other weapons that have no place in the cabin of an aircraft."

How do you know? They seem very tight-lipped about how effective they are at catching things vs things they miss and at least one test done by the TSA itself resulted in a 95% success rate - for the terrorists (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/reassessing_a...). But hey now you at least have the "right" to pay a fee to be labeled not a terrorist and go through security as if it was pre 9/11.

This really doesn't say anything about the benefits though. Just because people had "weapons" (some of which are basically harmless, like fishing tackle, or drinks), doesn't mean they prevented a threat. Yes, maybe the theater of it has dissuaded some from even attempting. Many, including myself, feel that many of the rules and the penalties for them are extreme.

Yes but many other countries do this same service with private companies for much less money.

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