Thank you for putting this so well. I agree completely.
Oh no you don’t. Look at what you literally wrote:
This implies that “it” is something new and never imagined before and now that it happened we’ll have copycats. But “It,” flying a plane into a building is not new at all; it’s been done before.
I’m sorry that my post was unclear. I was merely citing from the 9-11 commission’s report.
Again, it isn’t that “we” didn’t imagine it. Or that Tom Clancy didn’t. Or that numerous others didn’t.
Our government, before 9-11, didn’t believe it was possible, or that such a crash would cause such destruction. From the 911 Commission Report:
“We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.”
We are all welcome to agree or disagree with that statement, and the efficacy of what resulted. I do as well. But it is the statement that seems to have bound up our air travel safety since that attack, and should the TSA strike, the reaction of our government is likely to be fairly dramatic.
Yup, TSA is not doing much other than slowing down the process. They are more of a deterrent to low hanging fruit however, at the cost of a lot of time and some freedoms to move w/o ID.
Hijacking planes to crash into a building worked once (and wasn’t 100% successful, see flight 93) - it will never work again. However, low hanging fruit which is much more difficult now includes getting a bomb on a plane, which would be a lot easier w/o the TSA now, with probably a lot more people interested in doing so.
Off-topic, but one of the models that our military had for a large aircraft used as a weapon of mass destruction was the B-25 that crashed into the Empire State building. It had been a model for such possible attacks since the kamikaze attacks in the Pacific in WWII, apparently.
No one, however, seemingly fully gamed out the high-temperature combustibility of jet fuel opposed to gasoline or diesel, or gamed out the full effect of a passenger jet hitting a structure built with the kind of center support the WTC had.
Okay. I understand where you are making a differentiation but… the government imagines or knows about a lot things, and they don’t publicly react for a lot of reasons nor do they tell us everything they know.
If you’re talking about the TSA being suddenly shutdown, today, as a result of the government shutdown, then yes chaos will ensue. No one is happy.
If you’re asking me if I would stop flying in planes because we decide the TSA is crap, the answer is no, I would still fly planes because the TSA is terrible. They don’t actually function well in the role they’re supposed to have, so yeah, ditch it. They can’t find weapons anyway. They fail pretty much every, every test they’re given.
Not sure what your point is supposed to be. Immediately before 9/11 passengers were still screened before boarding a plane, just a bit less and by a security force run by the airports, not the feds. If the situation under discussion involved going from the TSA back to the same regime from just before 9/11, then yeah, you might say it’s no big deal and the effects would be minimal.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. What’s under discussion is going from the TSA to no security screening at all. And old fogies like me know for a fact that would be bad, because we remember the skyjacking era. Basically once air travel started to become popular in the 1960s, crooks with a little imagination started hijacking planes and demanding ransom for them. (“D.B. Cooper” was the most famous of these skyjackers but hardly the first or the only.) Terrorists also realized that skyjacking were the perfect way to make their political points. (Fortunately all of this happened before suicide bombers became a widespread thing, so terrorist skyjacking incidents generally involved holding hostages in exchange for a “ransom” of meeting political demands.) By the early 1970s, skyjackings were endemic in international air travel.
Airports responded by instituting much tougher security. By the dawn of the 1980s you were no longer breezing up to your gate with anything you wanted in your bags and all kind of sharp metal objects in your pockets. Instead there were the familiar security checkpoints where you and your bags went through a metal detector before you could reach the gate.
Thanks to tougher airport security, the frequency of skyjackings dropped even as world-wide air travel exploded.
If the TSA were to walk off their jobs tomorrow, you couldn’t recreate the pre-911 system of private security overnight. So the practical choices would either be no checkpoints and open season for skyjackers and suicide bombers, or shutting down the flights. And we know from history that the threat of skyjacking is not imaginary.
What a weird conversation. Do you really think if the TSA walked off the job that they’d just start letting people onto planes without going through security?
No…they’d ground air transportation until they got new people in there.
Which would be…no problem at all?
What are you talking about? I am not talking about the TSA going on strike, or just throwing their hands up and saying whatever. This would be a process to get rid of them.
The TSA is largely ineffective. We know this. It’s not shit I just made up. They can’t pass their tests, like ever. Forget the skyjacking days, let’s just pound in the fact that the TSA is bad at what they do. It does not work. Only insane people continue push for something they know does not work. It’s a false sense of safety, like a security blanket while bullets are flying around you.
We have lots of other safety protocols that were implemented other than the insane, slow ass and ineffective,shown by multiple tests to be ineffective, security checks. Cockpit safety protocols. Processes for jets, that’s our military jets, to shoot down commercial jets full of people. There has been way more done to address safety concerns beyond the TSA checkpoints.
And one of the biggest changes we have going for us since 911 is pretty much every passenger is going to assume if they sit back and listen to the people that hijacked a plane, they’re going die. The compliance piece is no longer guaranteed. There is a good chance that the people will revolt against their aggressors.
A few weeks ago, i went through security with this knife, that i forgot i had.
It wasn’t even in the bag. It was clipped onto the outside of the shoulder strap.
It’s entirely metal. It must have glowed like the sun in the XRay.
TSA employees are not competently trained.
Four. The number matters.
-Tom
So when I said what 3, that’s an indication I am using my memory, not Wikipedia. While I appreciate the schooling, the images burned in my mind are of the two towers and the Pentagon. On the screen, billowing smoke, terror and me having to leave for work. I am not sure I ever saw the fourth one until hours later. I had to work.
That’s my experience if that’s okay with you.
I will never forget number four. The passengers gave their lives to stop a fourth strike. They were heroes.
Everybody experiences disasters differently. My memory is locked on images and Morgan Stanley, one of the largest tenants in the towers… and person I know who frequented that tower and made it and the person who cannot, will not and may never be able to go to the site again… is my age and member of my family.
I am sorry I made a mistake, especially if it offended people but the rebuke was just an asshole move. Yeah I’m done for awhile. Congratz.
Well, it’s easy to diagnose a problem, harder to fix it. Especially when there’s no coherent political constituency that’s clamoring for a change. The TSA isn’t going anywhere, and no-one particularly wants it to. People may not like the TSA but no-one wants screenings to go away, even if they are mostly theater. Theater makes people feel better.
It may not have to take that long. The IRS suspends training and working tax returns while the government is closed. Considering nobody has seen the new tax returns and the software yet people who mail in their returns might get really screwed this year. And if the shutdown effects the software implementation then it will effect everybody.
Well, the 2018 5500-SSA are out, but those are usually worked on in 2017.
I don’t think Tom was offended, but making a very specific point. The number matters since the fourth plane is now the template for what passengers will do in an airplane hijacking case. The old playbook was to play along. The new one is for the passengers and crew to subdue the hijackers.
So even if a reduction in airport security lead to more hijackings, it probably wouldn’t lead to more planes being rammed into buildings.