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It’s a plug door, you can’t open it at altitude. Also, throwing debris into the engines would just result in an emergency landing. The TSA is ridiculous and t
by kortilla 3y ago
It’s a plug door, you can’t open it at altitude.
Also, throwing debris into the engines would just result in an emergency landing.
The TSA is ridiculous and there isn’t a need to try to contrive examples to justify what they could prevent outside of hijacking.
If their goal was to prevent killing just a plane load of people, they would have to setup perimeters far around the airport to prevent people with a 50 caliber rifle from shooting up the cockpit during takeoff roll.
They would also need to block private air access to the airport because someone could just drive a truck of explosives underneath a plane load of people taxiing.
Put differently, it their job was just mass casualty prevention in transit caused by other people, they would need to be near every bus station, controlling road access near buses, guarding all railroad tracks with passenger routes, etc.
- lamontcg 3y agoTSA lines are an obvious soft target and if someone wanted to take a lot of people with them, they could just use a suicide vest in the security lines. It would have the same chilling effects on the air travel economy and spread terror.
- mech422 3y agoYep - and it has been done already [0]. Stadiums, malls, and water supplies are other extremely soft targets. I tend to consider TSA to be 'make work' at this point... 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domodedovo_International_Airport_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domodedovo_International_Airpo...
- derefr 3y agoI would hypothesize that the goal isn't preventing mass casualties, but rather preventing mass casualties that shift popular sentiment toward making war with certain countries. (The government calls these acts "terrorism", but citizens being afraid isn't quite what they have a problem with!) The US government doesn't want a repeat of Sept 11. By which I don't mean "planes crashing into buildings"; but rather "operatives of some other country doing something on US soil, that results in US citizens becoming enraged-enough toward a particular other country, that — sensible realpolitik or not — any president that didn't declare war with that country, would be immediately impeached and replaced with one that would." The US government, despite being a nominal democracy, wants to "the head to control the heart" when it comes to deciding when to go to war — because the heart is very easy to manipulate, and because there are always tons of realpolitik things going on that the heart knows nothing about. I would guess that the government thinks that US citizens won't get too angry if terrorists bomb a bus, or a plane taking off/landing, or a line full of people. All these things are bad, but they don't strike me as being offensive to the American spirit. The TSA, meanwhile, is very concerned about the airspace above... football stadiums. Which tells you about their thinking re: what would "offend the American spirit."