Originally Posted by TSASCRNR
I encounter pilots every single day.
Most of them have an "I can bring down the plane with my controls, I dont need to be screened whatsoever" in their mind.
When someone makes $200,000 a year doing almost NOTHING, surrounded by nice blonde attendants, and travel all over the world while being paid for it... ya you can become very cocky.
Not surprising with the attitude they show--it's based in fact, as we saw with that EgyptAir pilot a few years back. They can crash the plane, so why worry if they have a knife, etc.? Of course, you'd want to be able to verify that that person is actually a pilot and is flying that day and not someone in a uniform with a faked ID.
However, I do think that bit about the salaries, etc., is unfair. To get to that level of pay, they put in years making next to nothing (some first officers make less than $20k a year, and pilots with regionals and those with low seniority with the big boys make $25-$35k for quite some time). And it's not like they get paid for exactly "nothing"; there's a ton of work that goes on before and after a flight, not to mention the time spent on-call as a reserve pilot, often away from family and not even flying.
Originally Posted by TSASCRNR
As far as threats with an RPG...
That is not what a terrorist wants. There is no satisfaction with just hitting the plane. They want to show they can maintain control and cripple the U.S.. Hitting a plane from far is not crippling anything, it also shows no control.
I think that if we were talking more than one attack--coordinated to occur roughly at the same time--then that is just the kind of statement people like bin Laden want to make. If he could bring down 10x airliners at about the same time, that would work to accomplish quite a lot for the terrorists.
tsadude did make a good point about the prohibitive cost of anti-missile systems. That doesn't make the threat any less, though. Missiles are a no-win scenario, but that's not an excuse to completely ignore them, either.