O O Ø O O O O
How to Hijack a Plane
The Aussies are missing the boat. Or perhaps it is a a plane. One of their ministers is in hot water for pointing out that requiring plastic knives on airplanes is worthless as a security measure, serving only to make people feel better.
It’s been said many times before—if you can hijack a plane with a metal butter knife, you can do it with a plastic one.
The current metal-knife-hysteria was, of course, prompted by the 9-11 hijackings, where (presumably) they did it by threatening to kill someone. The logic of the day was to cooperate with the hijackers, and that’s what was done. Those people didn’t die because of a box-cutter. They died because of a policy manual. They exploited a weakness in the airlines’ security model.
Why doesn’t eliminating “sharps” fix the problem? Because if you can hijack a plane by merely threatening to kill someone, well, there are more than a few ways to do it:
You can do it with a plastic knife. Just break it on the diagonal to make a sharp, plastic point, and hold that point to someone’s eyeball.
You can do it with a pencil, as was pointed out by Ms. Vanstone.
You can do it with a piece of rope. Or the power cord from your laptop. Or a big zip-tie. Just wrap it around the nearest flight attendant’s neck.
You can do it with a piece of glass, by breaking it into a sharp shard. On international flights, you can get you weapon delivered to you in your seat, and duty-free.
You can do it with a biohazard—say nerve gas, or anthrax. Just threaten to release it into the cabin, killing everyone within an hour, a day, or a week of exposure. If you don’t have real biohazards handy, you can substutute flour, or air. How do your victims know what these things look like?
You can do it with a bomb, of course, but that’s passé. You can also do it by opening the door, especially if you’re high enough, and there’s some way you can ensure it won’t close again.
If you’re on one of those fancy fly-by-wire planes, you can probably do it with a HERF gun. Turn it on, and every electrical circuit on the plane burns out.
You can do it with a vial of acid.
In fact, you can do it with your hands, if you know what you are doing.
So, is switching from metal to plastic knives a realistic “security measure” for preventing hijackings? Not one bit. All you need to defend against the 9-11-style attack was a statement, made as part of the safety speech:
“If a hijacking incident occurs, under no circumstances cooperate with the hijackers.”
Everything else is mere lip service. Way to go, Ms. Vanstone. It is long-past time the airline industry started worrying about actual security, rather than simply the appearence of it.
Kjell Wooding
November 22, 2005
OOØOOOODCCXXXI
November 23rd, 2005 at 3:41 pm
Can you actually open the airplane door in-flight? My understanding is that the cabin is pressurized, which should make getting it open without some pretty impressive hydraulic gear/catastrophic structural failure difficult.
Oh, and if I get cavity searched when I fly, I’ll be travelling to Calgary shortly thereafter. :)
November 23rd, 2005 at 5:37 pm
(Yes. I am a true bastard.)
The cavity search is doubly assured, now that you’ve added your name to the post. ;)
November 28th, 2005 at 11:17 am
I live in the US and I think they should allow all passengers to carry pocketknives on planes. Heck, pass large knives out at the door. Arm everyone in the tube. Terrorists try to hijack a plane, and a hundred people stop them in their tracks. Guns should also be allowed, only by special permit.
As it is, you can easily go to a gun and knife show, and buy one of those fancy plastic combat knives that are specifically designed to get past airport security, and to kill people. You don’t need a box cutter, or to get creative with a plastic knife. You can simply buy one of these knives for $20 and stick it in your pocket.
Here’s a link.
http://www.coldsteel.com/nise.html
Aaaaah, the illusion of safety.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms…disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes… Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
November 29th, 2005 at 10:50 pm
Mr. Weebo, you are my kind of muck-raiser.
December 8th, 2005 at 5:55 pm
Sheeeeeeeeet, all you do is make a phone call to the airport and tell them you jammed a bomb on flight # in the seat. There is little “security” really.
December 13th, 2005 at 2:16 pm
Which would accomplish what exactly, Mr. or Mrs. Spoke?
December 15th, 2005 at 3:36 pm
Weebo’s use of Thomas Jefferson’s words does little to build his argument for gun-toting jet passengers. After all, Jefferson penned the mighty words “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal,” yet never freed his own slaves. Much like our fundamentalist friends who refer to biblical scripture to prove that homosexuality is wrong or that abortion is a sin, while conveniently ignoring phrases that tell you it’s okay to kill your wife if another man rapes her. Oh, yeah, what were we talking about again? Hijacking airplanes? Surprisingly, neither the bible nor Jefferson had much to say about that one.
December 17th, 2005 at 12:46 pm
Jefferson’s ownership of slaves however, does not disprove the veracity of the words that Mr. Weebo used above.
We can’t use different centuries’ moral value judgements to conveniently declare someone a hyporcrit in order to refute any argument he might make.
January 8th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
Yes, but one can question whether Jefferson’s meaning in sentence one is easily understood, by showing how he interpreted sentence two in a way very different from ours.
June 22nd, 2006 at 7:02 am
i need a really original way to hijack a plane.. for a story… i liked the idea of af marx generator delivered as duty-free perfume..
August 20th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
I think hijacking a plane with a plastic knife is easy to do. You just need the right amount of people to grab the flight attendants. Then hi jack the cockpit.
June 12th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
just do a smelly pooh and everyone will run!