Originally Posted by PhlyingRPh

^

I don't like people watching me like hawks when I get up to to the lavatory, but I know that if I were to start banging on the cockpit door or yelling something stupid about wanting to open the cockpit door, I'd have about twenty people all up my, I mean, in my face within ten seconds flat. You can't check for propensity to do stuff like that at any checkpoint, no matter how thorough you check people, and I don't think one wants to predict behaviour.

Passengers really are the last and most effective line of defence against morons, because they don't care that you walked through the checkpoint with shinola in your pocket, but they will spring into action if you are trying to do something idiotic that will hurt them. Even though the number of incidents have been miniscule, like under ten in ten years of millions of flights a year, each time someone has tried to light a shoe, it's the other passengers that have done what was necessary.