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M.O.A.B wrote:

Braddock wrote:

M.O.A.B wrote:

And so could everyone else, but they didn't. People are aiming blame solely at US airlines, comparing them to European airlines as being defunct and unsafe when the reality is that any airliner anywhere in the world at the time could have suffered because of it.

Domestic flight security in the US was ridiculously lax, and by the sounds of things it still is - my friend is an illegal alien in the US and travels on domestic flights without any hassle whatsoever. The point is the history of danger was there, the intelligence reports were there, the list of enemies willing to do it was there, the only thing not there was the desire among security officials to plan accordingly for such an event. You are the most militantly active and aggressive Western country in the world, I can't believe you let your guard down so badly.

The UK?

I flew for the last time in '98, three years before 9/11. Airport security in the US was a lot stricter than it was when I flew from here.

Sorry, mistook you to be American, maybe i was confusing the handle MOAB with FEOS or something!?

Parker wrote:

Braddock wrote:

Parker wrote:

meh, airline security is a fucking joke....


i could get a knife on ANY airliner in the world....even in Israel, and it doesnt get much more secure than that.

Explain how you would manage that? I had to throw away a Leatherman once because I forgot I had it on me going through security.

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f180/ … ial035.jpg

All Air Marshalls should be issued with sandpaper as standard in that case!

Parker wrote:

Braddock wrote:

Parker wrote:

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f180/ … ial035.jpg

All Air Marshalls should be issued with sandpaper as standard in that case!

it may seem unrealistic, but i have gotten through a 2x4 with that.
hammered it through sheet rock as well.


it is very capable of opening someones throat, or separating brain stems.

A sharpened toothbrush can be very lethal as well, could easily whip one of those up in the toilet.

usmarine wrote:

Braddock wrote:

Look, The fact of the matter is if proper security measures had been followed those guys would not have made it onto the planes with weapon-like implements, FACT.

no, not fact.  if they wanted to, they still could have very easily.  you are trying to blame something that was not the problem.

You're right usmarine... I've seen the error in my thinking. The only way to prevent a 9/11 style attack happening again is to leave airport security to be as lax as it always was and just invade random countries in the Middle East. Fight them over there instead of over here I say. It may take the lives of a few thousand young men and women but I think it will be worth it in the end for the greater good.

the only way you could TRULY make an airplane secure is by really searching every single person that is going to get on.


that is just not practical. metal detectors and random searches are probably the best we can hope for.


but hell, they even provide weapons on the airplanes, in the form of magazines.


its possible to make them completely secure, but it just wont happen....maybe some years down the road, but i dont see any other options as it stands now.

well i suppose they could put x-ray machines up that people have to walk through...but then there are all sorts of other complications.

Braddock wrote:

usmarine wrote:

Braddock wrote:

Look, The fact of the matter is if proper security measures had been followed those guys would not have made it onto the planes with weapon-like implements, FACT.

no, not fact.  if they wanted to, they still could have very easily.  you are trying to blame something that was not the problem.

You're right usmarine... I've seen the error in my thinking. The only way to prevent a 9/11 style attack happening again is to leave airport security to be as lax as it always was and just invade random countries in the Middle East. Fight them over there instead of over here I say. It may take the lives of a few thousand young men and women but I think it will be worth it in the end for the greater good.

wj
what's the matter with you?  pull yer head out for a second and listen.

the ONLY reason 9/11 happened was because of the way airlines dealt with hijackers for years and years.  placate them and get the plane on the ground.  shit, TWA had a route they nick named the cuban express because of all the cuban hijackers back in the day.

now, we dont open the door no matter what.  it was never like that at all.

so, no matter how many machines you have, if you open the door you lose.

Braddock wrote:

Well then a 'locked cockpit' policy with no exceptions could have been implemented at little or no cost in light of that intelligence report, could it not?

that's not the way it was done for years and years.  come on dude.  arm chair quarterbacking is lame.

Braddock wrote:

Come on mate, there were reports sitting on desks specifically saying that domestic airplanes were at risk... a little foresight would have been nice.

when the hijacking policy had been working for years..........why any real alarm if you think about it.

Braddock wrote:

If you guys really are serious about tackling terror you're going to have to get rid of that attitude... you're gonna have to start continually thinking outside the box from now on.

duh.  and thats what we are doing.  doesnt matter how many pax get sliced and diced, the door wont open...................for the most part.

Braddock wrote:

FEOS wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

Yay here we go:

In April 2001, NORAD ran a war game in which the Pentagon was to become incapacitated; a NORAD planner proposed the simulated crash of a hijacked foreign commercial airliner into the Pentagon but the Joints Chiefs of Staff rejected that scenario as "too unrealistic"

In July 2001 at the G8 summit in Genoa, anti-aircraft missile batteries were installed following a report that terrorists would try to crash a plane to kill George Bush and other world leaders.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the National Reconnaissance Office, who are responsible for operating U.S. reconnaissance satellites, had scheduled an exercise simulating the crashing of an aircraft into their building, four miles (6 km) from Washington Dulles International Airport.

Seems like plenty of advance knowledge which might have encouraged the 'intel' community to at least suggest locking cockpit doors?

"too unrealistic". That should have ended the discussion right there.

Remind me never to appoint you head of a security department should I ever make it in politics... it wasn't too unrealistic, it was very fucking realistic as it turns out. This wasn't a plan to anticipate the attack of aliens or large sea creatures, it was a plan to anticipate airplanes being hijacked and they took their eye right off the ball. Airplanes have been getting hijacked for years and the US security services were happy to sit their complacently in some sort of false sense of invincibility allowing all and sundry to board planes with all manner of devices. 9/11 should not have been 'necessary' to get airline security up to scratch.

You've completely missed the point.

The scenario involving a hijacking is not unrealistic. Up until 9/11, the scenario that hijackers would drive the planes into a building without demanding something beforehand (at least) was entirely unrealistic. Not based on opinion, but based on decades of history. There was a reason that it is viewed as realistic now and unrealistic then. 9/11 changed risk assessment calculus government-wide and world-wide.

You are applying what we know now, assuming it should have been known then. That's like saying that because we know planes can fly supersonic now that aircraft engineers in the 20s should've known it too (they thought it was physically impossible, btw).

FEOS wrote:

Braddock wrote:

FEOS wrote:

"too unrealistic". That should have ended the discussion right there.

Remind me never to appoint you head of a security department should I ever make it in politics... it wasn't too unrealistic, it was very fucking realistic as it turns out. This wasn't a plan to anticipate the attack of aliens or large sea creatures, it was a plan to anticipate airplanes being hijacked and they took their eye right off the ball. Airplanes have been getting hijacked for years and the US security services were happy to sit their complacently in some sort of false sense of invincibility allowing all and sundry to board planes with all manner of devices. 9/11 should not have been 'necessary' to get airline security up to scratch.

You've completely missed the point.

The scenario involving a hijacking is not unrealistic. Up until 9/11, the scenario that hijackers would drive the planes into a building without demanding something beforehand (at least) was entirely unrealistic. Not based on opinion, but based on decades of history. There was a reason that it is viewed as realistic now and unrealistic then. 9/11 changed risk assessment calculus government-wide and world-wide.

You are applying what we know now, assuming it should have been known then. That's like saying that because we know planes can fly supersonic now that aircraft engineers in the 20s should've known it too (they thought it was physically impossible, btw).

Maybe my attitude is different because I work in technology development where thinking outside of the box is encouraged at all times... I would have thought the same applied in risk assessment but obviously not.

EDIT: Also, we've had suicide bombers, plane hijackings and even kamikaze pilots in the past... it's not that much of a leap to get to what happened on 9/11.

Last edited by Braddock (2008-11-25 04:54:38)

Dilbert_X wrote:

FEOS wrote:

Up until 9/11, the scenario that hijackers would drive the planes into a building without demanding something beforehand (at least) was entirely unrealistic.

Take off your blinkers for just a second.

I'm not wearing "blinkers". I'm talking about facts. You may want to look the word up.

Dilbert_X wrote:

In April 2001, NORAD ran a war game in which the Pentagon was to become incapacitated; a NORAD planner proposed the simulated crash of a hijacked foreign commercial airliner into the Pentagon but the Joints Chiefs of Staff rejected that scenario as "too unrealistic"

In July 2001 at the G8 summit in Genoa, anti-aircraft missile batteries were installed following a report that terrorists would try to crash a plane to kill George Bush and other world leaders.

It was realistic, it was known.
Just having an aircraft hijacked would have been bad enough, given the heightened threat doing 'something' would have been worth a stab.
Instead nothing was done by your illustrious leaders.

Go back and read what I already posted in response to those comments. You're starting to post like rammunition now...thinking that just repeating the same thing over and over somehow makes it more applicable.

It was NOT realistic (according to conventional wisdom at the time). It was NOT known. It is ONLY after the fact, AFTER 9/11, that one can connect those dots. You keep looking at it from the post-9/11 perspective, totally ignoring what the situation was like prior to 9/11.

Yes, 9/11 had many points along the way, where if someone had acted, it could have been prevented. It is just like an aircraft accident (or any other accident, for that matter)...there is a chain of events that could have been stopped at many points prior to the accident. It is only by deconstructing the accident and the situation surrounding it (to include common procedures, perceptions, standards of behavior, etc) that one learns what caused it and how to prevent it in the future. That prevention normally involves changing one or more of the primary contributing factors in the hope that the same incident doesn't occur for the same reasons in the future. Until that accident happens, however, many of the key contributing factors cannot be uncovered because the investigative process isn't being driven by a known event (the accident) and worked backward. That event changes the investigative calculus completely.

That is the part you keep missing.