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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Or to put it in a more general way: is security theatre now costing lives?

To be fair, reinforced cockpit doors is pretty much the one measure that's NOT dismissed as security theatre.

I can't imagine a more false statement, as the business model before 9/11 was do nothing and cooperate and everyone will be safe, and the business model after 9/11 is every person on the plane must rush the hijackers or thousands will be killed. So the reinforced door is a response to a problem that no longer exists.

Ideally you'd have a door that is strong enough to be "people proof" for long enough for the entire passenger compartment to rush a dude, but not strong enough to survive the entire passenger compartment trying to get in and save the plane in this situation. Something that can survive a couple kicks but isn't a bank vault door. Pretty much a typical apartment door would be about right.

If the attackers enter the cockpit they can doom the plane;

If they are outside trying to get into the cockpit, there may be time for passengers to react and neutralize them?

>So the reinforced door is a response to a problem that no longer exists.

I very much disagree. Previously, an attacker could get to the cockpit by surprise and by suddenly overwhelming cabin crew. That is now much. much more difficult.

How? The door is still locked, just not heavily reenforced. Passengers are going to notice someone trying to kick the door down and you can believe that person will be taken care of quickly.

Safety procedures in airplanes are generally not based on "passengers are going to notice and react". If you have a specific role for some passengers, like subduing disruptive individuals or opening and operating an emergency exit, the passengers are informed and qualified for the job. For instance, if you sit on an exit row, you need to be physically agile enough, and the crew instructs you to learn how to operate the door.

Assuming your attacker is easily identified prior to reaching the door.

I disagree on this one. Bruce Schneier, who writes often, and passionately, on the ridicelousness of "security theater", cites doors (along with your your statement that passengers must resist) as having improved safety to a measurable degree.

But there isn't, sadly, an absolutely fix for every vulnerability. We can reduce the number of incidents and mitigate the risk, but some will always remain. It is the price one pays for such extraordinary freedoms and luxuries.

https://www.schneier.com/news/archives/2008/11/the_things_he...

But then how long would it take to break open the door in this case? I haven't read about the time between when the descent was set in, the pilot returning and realizing he was locked out - I'm sure someone that deliberately wants to crash the plane can do so within a minute (dump fuel, start a nosedive at max speed and start spinning, etc). You can't break open a door when your plane is upside-down.

I strongly doubt it (for the particular case of strong cockpit doors).

Historically, hijackings are more deadly than rogue pilots. Neither one is a particularly big threat, but hijackings are the more important threat of the two. How many potential attacks from the past decade and a half got stopped in the planning stage because "Well gee, Bob, that sounds great, but how are we going to get into the cockpit?" While this stuff is rare, I bet it's not zero.

Beyond that, does not having a locked cockpit door actually save you from rogue pilots? I don't think so. There's a lot you can do to defeat other people when you're the only one belted in at the controls. A series of violent vertical maneuvers would suffice to defeat anyone trying to get back in. Imagine if, instead of locking the door, this guy had just pushed the nose over to negative two gees, then pulled up at positive three, repeat until everyone is dead? Or, pull the breakers for the higher-level fly-by-wire systems, point the nose at the ground, apply full throttle, and rip the wings off? The thinking seems to be that there was a calm 10 minutes or so in which he could have been stopped if only the door hadn't been in the way, but the only reason there was a calm 10 minutes was because the door was in the way.

> Historically, hijackings are more deadly than rogue pilots.

Is this true? I can't remember a single other plane hijacking that resulted in the deaths of passengers outside of 9/11.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

There were definitely a couple.

They didn't necessarily crash, but dead passengers weren't uncommon in hijackings, typically either killed by the hijackers, killed by security services storming the airplane, or both:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

Lots of those were resolved without death, or with just a few deaths, but many others got lots of people killed.

It's difficult to look into an alternate universe, but it's not out of the question that the only reason we still have air travel at all is reinforced cockpit doors. Prior to that, the risk/reward profile was distressingly in favor of the attacker, and as asymmetric warfare continues its likely decades-long ascendancy, using airplanes as weapons was likely to become ever more popular, with corresponding unpleasant second-order effects which would be a distraction to enumerate here, but in summary, "really bad for the global economy".

As is the way of things, the current manifestations of asymmetric warfare can muddy up the discussion with modern-day politics, so please allow me to remind you that science fiction authors have been predicting the rise of it since at least the 1980s, just due to the ever-rising destructive power any one individual can wield. Who or what cause happens to pick it up is an accident of history, but you can be guaranteed someone will try. This is an incentive structure that those of us on the side of civilization are going to be doing continuous battle with for a long time.

The locking doors aren't theatre though, they are a specific action that has a clear impact (control over commercial planes is limited to a much smaller set of people).

One day it may catch up to terrorism theatre!

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