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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Boxcutters are no longer effective tools of terror on airliners. They ceased to be so on the morning of 9/11/2001. Why try to stop them now?

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I think you're underestimating the havoc that a group of well-trained individuals armed with knives could cause in the middle of a transcontinental flight even with a locked, reinforced cabin door.

I agree it's not as clear cut as a ban on firearms or explosives, but it seems like a sensible restriction to me, worth enforcing as best we can.

A "group of well-trained individuals" is going to manage to create the weapons mentioned in the link in the OP. You're never going to be able to stop someone who really puts their mind to it.

The rationale in this sub-thread was to leave the current security in place "to weed out the idiots, mentally unstable, etc", and those people will be stopped by passengers after the mindset of what the goal of an airplane is changed on 9/11 (it used to be "they want to redirect the flight to Cuba" now it's "they want to redirect the flight into a building").

Maybe I am. The way I envision such an attack, they pull out their knives and start threatening or cutting people. Then the rest of the passengers, knowing that they will die if they don't stop this, dogpile on the attackers and subdue them. They then tie them to their seats with whatever is handy and hand them over to the police when they land. Where does that go wrong?

When they pull their knives but immediately grab a child and threaten their life. Who is going to be the one to start this dog pile but also cause the demise of a child?

Passengers today know that everyone on the airplane is going to die if they don't act. That child is already dead if they don't act. People with nothing to lose are extremely dangerous, and that's what any hijacked passenger is now. Sun Tzu says never to back your enemy into a corner with no way out. 9/11 only worked because the passengers thought they had a way out. Nobody thinks that now.

What about extreme physical fitness and martial arts? Or, to quote Carlin, "really big hands" - does a knife or 10 really make the difference?

Better be a big group or they're going to be drastically outnumbered. Since 9/11 here have been several cases of real or apparent threats on aircraft that were quickly ended when passengers piled on.

All the pilots have to do in that case is start maneuvering the plane in a manner that makes standing up impossible.

It's really very easy to stop this type of thing.

> I think you're underestimating the havoc that a group of well-trained individuals armed with knives could cause in the middle of a transcontinental flight even with a locked, reinforced cabin door.

Of course they can do a lot of damage. But they don't have to be on a plane for that. They can do a lot of damage on the street. The big question is: can they take control of the plane and use it as a weapon?

Nowadays, passengers know that hijacking means likely death. That knife won't stop everybody.

What the press will say if someone gets a boxcutter onto a plane and tries to do something with it.

Who cares?

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