Originally Posted by
travisc
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Lock down (physically rearchitect if need be) the cockpit so during flight no one gets in, no one gets out. Toilets and rest areas are included in this secure area. There must be no physical way to travel between cockpit and cabin while in flight (i.e. pilots enter via separate exterior door). It's awfully hard to take over a plane if the cockpit can't be compromised. This requires training of pilots to understand that preventative losses are acceptable losses. Second, each plane should have a dual-key activated defensive system to knock out people in the main cabin (via oxygen decreasing or some chemical agent or some other solution) which requires both pilot and the relevant authority on the ground (military? FBI?) to activate.
In the long run it will be cheaper than the security theatre of late, and more effective.
If you haven't noticed, over the last 5 years or so, almost all of the TSA initiatives have been focused on explosives. The Great Pointy Object Search is a thing of the past. Nail clippers and corkscrews are now allowed.
Puffers, swabbing, laptops out, the shoe carnival, the liquid restrictions, and the full body scanners are all designed to prevent someone blowing up the plane, not designed to take over the plane. Because as others noted here, the combination of the reinforced cockpit door and the post-911 policy change (no pilot will ever willingly give up control) mean that the cockpits are already secure enough.
As much as I dislike the TSA, it's not because of the front line. While there are plenty of anecdotes on this board about TSO power trips, for the most part, the folks manning the checkpoint do usually act in a professional manner. For me (and I'd guess most here), what bothers us about TSA is the
policies that they set. The aforementioned shoe carnival, liquid rules, the pat downs, the millions spent on the wrong technologies, all the "theater" designed to make the public
feel safe, rather than to make us
actually safe.
So, yeah, we could replace the TSA screeners with private contractors as they used to be, and it might not make us any less or more safe. But even if it were private screeners, the rules and methods used would still be set by the government. If we abolish the TSA, then I assume it would be another federal agency. After all, the denizens of this board demand consistency.
What needs to change is how and why the rules get defined.