Alan- After spending sometime to reflecting on this thing, I am still reaching the same horrible conclusion that I reached halfway thru yesterday. That this could have been fully prevented.
By far, the weakest link remains security for cockpit doors for planes. It is so ridiculously easy to get into the cabin of an airline. It has happened numerous times over the past many years (air rage). The airlines have seen this problem, and have chose in their wisdom not to do a single thing about it (besides some PR smoke after each incident, dissapating some thereafter).
I think you can reach a reasonable conclusion that the lack of action on the airlines was a function of money. The airlines were simply too cheap to redo the front part of planes to accomodate newer, safer doors (w/extra-thick glass, or whatever). They put profits ahead of a danger that they knew was out there, and only took a couple well-funded crazies to implement.
Before I get called for Monday morning quarterbacking, let me state that I find it virtually impossible for the airlines/airport to prevent weapons like knifes or boxcutters to enter a plane. Even with heightened security, you will never get to such a level that you can prevent an occurence. That I understand, and I do not blame the airlines for that.
Likewise, we are kidding ourselves if we think we can stop everyone at our porous borders, and play "pick the terrorist" out of the crowd successfully on every occasion. Additionally, I have no expectation that airport security can get past a certain level of competence.
But I do find it horrifying that the airlines refused to pro-actively implement was could have been a relatively easy, low-tech solution to put the biggest of roadblocks in the path of any hijacker, and I absolutely refuse to believe that scenarios similar to yesterday were never discussed by the heads of the major airlines and/or that the thought never occurred to a CEO about the possibility. And yet, they chose to do nothing.
I'll go a step further. If these thoughts never occurred to the CEO of an airline, (and they didn't reach the very workable solution/conclusion of "we need to retrofit every door"), then they should resign because of incompetence. If this did occur to these CEOs, then they should resign due to inaction. Either way, they should resign.
This time, we made it way too easy for the terrorists. This was preventable. |
