Is the USA prepared for another hijacking?

[Corsair 115]

However, that doesn't give Al-Qeada room to play with. OBL and KSM were creative, we need to think as outside the box as they did.

How about a propane tanker truck rigged into a giant fuel air-bomb and driven into the Superbowl on game day? Or the West Edmonton Mall on Boxing Day?

Or a string of smaller attacks. The Columbine massacre still scars the national psyche, despite having a little over a dozen casualties. Imagine the havoc that could be wrought by parking a dozen truck bombs outside a dozen daycare centers across the country.

You could go even more low-tech than that. Remember the DC area sniper attacks? Imagine if that was replicated in five or six major American cities starting on the same day. It would cause an enormous amount of fear and would consume a huge amount of law enforcement resources, and would be very hard to stop. The main reason the DC area snipers got caught was because they got careless. Presumably Al-Qaeda sniper teams would not make such mistakes.

Fortunately for the U.S., Al-Qaeda and its ilk don't seem interested in such low-tech assaults and instead prefer large, dramatic, set-piece type of attacks. Which are, of course, much more difficult to organize and execute.

 

[pipelineaudio]

The private security and baggage crew that work Sky Harbor International include many illegal aliens, not just in general access but on the tarmac and secured areas.

At Honolulu International, the south runway is accessible to anyone with an AOA badge (I could get one on Tuesday) and up to two guests

If anyone wants to do something nasty, it would be child's play

 

[Darth Rotor]

Is a barrel roll even feasible on a large passenger jet? And can it be done quickly enough to do any good, or will the hijackers have time to brace themselves?

Pop some negative g even better.

Sword of Truth

I have a friend who used to fly F-18s for the Canadian Air Force and now flies for Air Canada. He says he he gets a knock on the door in-flight and sees a stranger through the peephole, he's just gonna do a barrel roll and drop the silly bastard on his head.

Wrong maneuver to do that.

Almo
Can a 747 sustain a barrel roll? Just curious. I would just figure the wings were set up to hold the weight only one way.

A barrel roll is a one G maneuver, if done correctly, which makes the original comment a bit misguided. Most aircraft will be structurally OK. However, doing a roll like that in a heavy takes a bit of skill. You can ask Reheat or beachnut about that, they have both flown heavies, and more aerobatic aircraft.

FWIW: A somewhat easier way to handle the nitwit at the door is to unload the aircraft: push to somewhere between 0 to -1.0 g. (not sure how far beyong -1 G one would wnat to test a passenger liner ... )

The pax in the seat belts should be OK, the guy standing at the door, most likely flailing about and thumping his head on the ceiling, then falling back to the floor.

Cabin crew might fly about as well, sad to say ...

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

Wrong maneuver to do that.

A barrel roll is a one G maneuver, if done correctly, which makes the original comment a bit misguided. Most aircraft will be structurally OK. However, doing a roll like that in a heavy takes a bit of skill. You can ask Reheat or beachnut about that, they have both flown heavies, and more aerobatic aircraft.

My friend flies 777s. As mentioned, he's also a former fighter jock who would love an excuse to have a little fun.

As for the skill needed, he told me once about the procedure they had to follow when intercepting soviet TU-95s. Each Bear had it's own serial number written along the bottom of the fuselage that pilots had to take down while escorting them out of the ADIZ. This was used by US and Canadian military intelligence to keep track of every TU-95 that the soviets sent over. In daylight this was easy. At night it got a little more difficult.

On the Canadian version of the F/A-18, there is a 600,000 candlepower spotlight on one side just below the pilots canopy. To get the TU-95s number at night, the Canadian pilot would flip his aircraft on its side, fly up underneath the russian plane and hold it steady while he read off the serial number.

Chances are, he would probably do as you described if the situation arose, just dip the nose and knock Abdullah on his afterburner. But he could have some real fun if he wanted to.

 

[doctoraudit]

if a terrorist has enough money and wants access to a plane, he can just buy one. No security checks if you own it.

 

[Thunder]

no one has answered my question.

if a plane was hijacked, could we shoot it down within 30 minutes?

 

[Corsair 115]

no one has answered my question.

if a plane was hijacked, could we shoot it down within 30 minutes?

Seems to me there's an awful lot of variables involved to make any blanket answer of questionable usefulness.

 

[Uncayimmy]

I'm surprised how many want to just "no way, not gonna happen again, ever" response.

I'd like to believe that, but I can't personally figure for every single possible action and reaction that can happen. What makes you guys so sure? Are you really certain that every passenger would definitely jump up to defend the plane? Are you really certain that you have considered every possible angle this could unfold on, and how it may complicate things?

I think you're missing the point, which hasn't been stated clearly. It's not that passengers will definitely be able to thwart a takeover. It's that any would-be terrorist has to now consider that passengers will attempt to thwart the takeover. Before 9/11 passengers were merely hostages and one goal of the terrorists was to survive. Now passengers will see themselves as murder victims and terrorists will be assumed to be on a suicide run.

9/11 was a low-risk operation, yet within an hour (pardon me if I don't know the time line accurately), it became a high risk operation (the flight over PA). That has not changed. At this point anybody attempting to take over a plane is just incredibly stupid. The chance of success is very low. Combine that with increased security screening (still defeatable), and it's just not a good approach.

There are numerous other high-impact, low-risk methods of terrorism that don't involve planes. If suicide is part of the deal, then the chances of success are extremely high.

 

[Laeke]

ok, it is clearly less likely to hijack a plane from a western country.

but what about a plane on route to the USA from African, Latin America, African, and Asia?

my question still stands: are we prepared to deal with a hijacking once it takes place?

I'm no international flight specialist but a couple of logical points about your "plane from abroad" theory:

- Foreign airlines also beefed up their security. While we can probably argue there's an uneven level of investment made, I would suppose most of the big companies have new cockpit doors, new securities, etc... Smaller companies might not have, but they also have smaller planes so it would not be as efficient.
- Hijacking an international flight has its disadvantages: if you try to do it early and you are spotted, the defense grid has more time to go into full gear and intercept. If you do it later, I suspect the plane might have limited options because of its fuel reserves?

On 9/11 the hijackers took over the planes as soon as possible and used interior flights because it allowed them to go on target ASAP while everyone was in panic.

 

[Cobalt]

I would imagine the odds of pulling off a hijacking are absurdly small to the point of being not worth trying.

Supposing they did make the attempt, I don't think people are just going to be willing to sit back and take it anymore.

Could we light up a hijacked plane in 30 minutes? Probably not, but I don't see that kind of quick response being necessary.

 

[mhaze]

....Could we light up a hijacked plane in 30 minutes? Probably not, but I don't see that kind of quick response being necessary.

There have always been places in the US that were protected by fueled, ready to go fighter aircraft with crews on rotation.

I can't see any reason to advertise the locations - my comment is based on having many times driven by such locations.

There are other places which have now and which have in the past had missile batteries operational, in place and with crews manned 24/7.

Again, there is no particular reason to advertise such things.

Does this mean you are right or wrong? It means that it's not intended for you to know.

 

[Corsair 115]

On 9/11 the hijackers took over the planes as soon as possible and used interior flights because it allowed them to go on target ASAP while everyone was in panic.

Another reason was the low level of security for such domestic flights as opposed to international flights, even back then.

 

[Thunder]

what about cargo flights? what kinda security does DHL, UPS, USPS have for their planes?

 

[Laeke]

what about cargo flights? what kinda security does DHL, UPS, USPS have for their planes?

I would think that since those planes do not have passengers, are limited to authorized personnel, probably operate in a different part of the airport where a civilian would stick out like a sore thumb and at the very least with custom agents in the vinicity... getting access to one would likely be quite more difficult than a regular passenger plane.

A while back in France, some of the workers taking care of the luggage at Roissy CDG international airports were wrongfully suspected of being terrorists. I'm bringing this up because we learned that those guys needed to have a security clearance for this job.

I am not ruling out the possibility of an hijacking, and security is never as tight as it should ideally be, but airports are quite a controlled environment. The level of security going on there is pretty unusual in our societies, esp. compared to something like public transportation in major cities. And the terrorists knows this, judging by the Madrid and London bombings in 04-05 (and one of the Paris bombings in 95).

 

[Eddie Dane]

The logic has changed.

Before 9-11 I would have kept quiet and hope that negotiation would end a high-jacking.

After 9-11, I will personally hand in the perp to the FBI. Probably with one of those industrial-sized airline coffee containers up his ***.

That is, if the little old lady on the seat in front of me doesn't beat me to it and stabs a piece of plastic cutlery through his eye-socked.

Airline passengers have undergone an attitude change.