Letters to the Editor
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100% Safety is Impossible; Soft Solutions Help
As Patrick Smith has said on numerous occasions, there is no perfect solution to airline safety. Some degree of terrorist vulnerability will be involved so long as there are people who want to blow up airplanes.
Part of the problem, as other letter-writers have pointed out, is the barn door locking nature of many of the "improvements" put into the system. Box cutters were no longer a viable option by the time of Flight 93, but we kept knitting needles out of planes for years. No other country screens shoes, including Israel. Now I have friends contemplating taking a non-stop flight from Seattle to Copenhagen with two young children without so much as a bottle of water. There are dangers on flights other than terrorist attacks; when someone starts to suffer severe dehydration over the Pole, and the flight crew simply has nothing left to serve (having, of course, no warning that they'd need to double their stock of beverages today, and no extra space in the galley for it), who is being served?
One of the things I appreciated on one of the first flights I took after 9/11 was the captain coming on and requesting everyone to take a moment and introduce themselves to their seatmates. Vigilant air marshals on such a flight might notice who was not getting into the spirit of the occasion, and perhaps move their seats near them, or make sure they followed them into the restroom, or whatever. I'm not up on the exact tactics that might work, but I remember well the way the captain's announcement cut down on the tension and fear in the plane.
Being required to take a ten-hour flight without a laptop or even, if the reports are to be believed, a book, is not going to lower tension, is not going to increase passenger safety, and is not going to make airlines financially sound. And the terrorists consider that they win either way, because making millions of airline passengers squirm is only by degrees less enjoyable to them than blowing up a plane in the sky.