Two biggest threats to airliners are guns (for taking over the plane) and bombs (for blowing them up). Metal detecters, bomb dogs and maybe armed flight crews (

Two biggest threats to airliners are guns (for taking over the plane) and bombs (for blowing them up). Metal detecters, bomb dogs and maybe armed flight crews (we do this now) are really all that's needed to deal with all of those. The current setup is all about $M's that security contractors get for high-end scanning equipment (as opposed to dogs that can be trained for $50K). If you think sniffer > dogs, I have a shooting bag (complete with recent burns from muzzle flash) I take as my duffle, and it's been through the sniffer and nothing was detected. It's easy to imagine a hermetically sealed large laptop battery with explosives to bring a plane down. The people who did 9/11 were engineers, they could figure it out... We're no more safe than we were, but the chances are VERY slim to be killed yourself. We're better fighting heart disease than airplane terrorism.