Pre 9/11 you didn’t even need an ID to board a flight. And you could take a knife with you.
Having a reliable ID system is only useful if you have a security apparatus to check them, which literally did not exist then.
Having a reliable ID system is only useful if you have a security apparatus to check them, which literally did not exist then.
The justification for all of the security theatre after 9/11 was that it would stop terrorist attacks. Makes no difference what passport they have as long as you can determine they're not smuggling a bomb up their ass.
Not to mention that you can't take down a plane with a box-cutter anymore. The only way the 9/11 hijackers were successful is that the remaining passengers thought that the hijackers were pirates. It's a burned 0-day.
You could just enact a policy of shooting down all planes within a certain radius of large buildings. I wouldn't be surprised if the annual cost would be orders of magnitude less than the annual cost of TSA. As long as you could ensure that aircraft couldn't be weaponized against major infrastructure, hijacking a plane would be no more dangerous than hijacking a train.