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MY 2 CENTS

On these pages I will put my own 'biased, uneducated, unaffiliated', take on issues currently in the news. Navigation links can be found on the left of the page.

9/25/01 Airline Security, as being spoken about in congress today.

Apparently, the Pilot's association has asked for, and now Congress is agreeing, that pilots should be armed. My opinion? Dumb idea. The whole problem with the WTC disasters is the terrorists taking over the controls of the planes. They do that by getting in the cockpit. If a pilot were the airplane's line of defense; it could only work if he opens the door, and comes out of the cockpit. Once out, what next? What if there are 3-4 (or more) hi-jacker's on board. Will they line up and stand there while he shoots them one by one? Does every pilot have what it takes to shoot even the first one without hesitation? (hopefully the pilots life skills are more honed towards flying a plane and keeping people alive than that of a mercenary type individual). The ones that do, will most likely get one, maybe even two hi-jackers (and the ones that don't, against people trained in terrorism, won't get any). By then, the other hi-jackers will have stormed and taken over the pilot. Would these people be the least bit afraid to attack a gun-weilding pilot? What would they be afraid of, dieing? When their plan is to die in a short period of time anyway? Now, guess what? The cockpit door is open, and the hi-jackers have a gun. This entire scheme, would just make matters worse. How these otherwise intelligent people on capitol hill can't see this is beyond me.

No, what has to happen, is the cockpit needs to be sealed. It needs a REAL door and wall, something that whatever the bad guys did happen to smuggle on board would not be able to penetrate. What would be the worst thing that could happen? The terrorists could tell the pilot they will kill one individual every minute until he opens the door. And, after what we've seen, we know that he is better off losing an entire plane full of passengers, than an additional 5,000+ people on the ground. Besides, if the passengers knew they were in line to die, I would think every man, woman, and child on that plane would storm the terrorists.

Sure, put an armed marshal on board. But, even he shouldn't have access to the cockpit. He could be there to try to protect the lives of the passengers. But, if he DID fail, there would still be a pilot to take the airliner to the nearest landing spot.

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Of course now they are saying that it is definitely possible the hi-jackers were already IN the cockpit. Apparently, there is this 'professional courtesy' where an airline will let another pilot (even from another airlines) sit in the jump seat in the cockpit, on a flight. Well, there's a no-brainer. END THAT SH*T IMMEDIATELY!!!

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One more issue about planes, is their black boxes. Every time there is a crash, all we here about is recovering these black boxes. Most of the time, when (if) they do, they tell us they couldn't get useful information from them anyway (or at least that's what they tell us). It really wouldn't be all that difficult to upload, say, every minute (or even broadcast continually) the signals from both recorders to satellites. The data could be held for a period of a day after the plane lands. This way, it would not require much storage space at all. We wouldn't be searching the bottom of the ocean, or the bottom of a pile of rubble, to find a black box. We would have that information immediately, from any incident. As a matter of fact, we could have it live, as it was happening; as the FAA should be able to dial in to any particular flight at any particular time. The transponders should not be able to be turned off except for from outside the plane. Every commercial airliner could have its own broadcast code. How many more people are their with cell phones than airliners? We seem to have a pretty easy time of that (technically speaking), and that is on the ground, with obstructions, weather, etc. From high in the sky, it would seem a satellite would always be easily reached. The entire problem would be eliminated.

Comments can be sent to mike@operation-infinitejustice.org

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