RE: Lack of Security

[Scott A Crosby <crosby () qwes math cmu edu>]

On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Mathias K?rber wrote:

> | What if we were to increase the security of the pilots (basically the
> | cabin door) and then place some type of secure "sleeping gas" in the
> | cabin that could be triggered by the pilots?  Now, I know this sounds
> | like something out of a James Bond movie, but in our short discussion,
> | we could not think of a downside.  Comments?
>
> 1. Medical problems some passengers may have with the gas? While it
> might be a reasonable tradeoff to lose a passenger or two if the
> whole plane (and whatever it may hit) can be saved, making that determination
> that early (at the first sign of an hijack attempt) would likely be
> impossible.

Worse than that if you think about it...

Given that there are about 4000 major flights a day, in a given year,
thats about 1.2 million flights a year. So, if your gassing-system is
99.999% reliable, in that there is a .001% chance of it being triggered
accidently in any flight, you'll gas about 10 flights a year (say) a
thousand people, unnecessarily. In 10 years, the time since the last
hijacking, you'd gas about 10,000 people.

Compare the disruption and possible deaths caused by those gassings with
the slim benefit they might have against determined and thoughtful
hijackers, who haven't hijacked a domestic airliner in 10 years.

Now, this is nanog, we know how hard it is to obtain 5x9's of reliability.

After running the numbers, IMHO, its a really really bad idea.


Scott


[*] Number of flights per day are taken from CNN.
[*] 10 years till last hijacking also taken from CNN.



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