Look at this article from September 04 from a mag called The Travel Insider:
This most important lesson of 9/11 has been obscured in the horror of the tragedy, and by the massive over-reaction that followed. The lesson is simply this : Don't allow terrorists to take control of a plane. Defend the cockpit at all costs.
How well have we responded to this lesson?
Amazingly, prior to 9/11, neither pilots nor airlines wanted strong cockpit doors. Pilots worried about getting trapped in the cockpit after a crash, and airlines worried about the extra cost and weight.
Stronger Cockpit Doors
The FAA over-rode the objections of pilots and airlines, and insisted on stronger cockpit doors. However, it also gave the airlines 19 months to fit the doors to their planes!
This was done, as directed, although critics would point out the new strengthened doors, while bullet proof and very expensive (costing the better part of $50,000 each), are not actually person proof - a 225 lb man, running into the door at 5.5mph, would create enough impact to collapse the door.
Needless to say, there is more danger from terrorists simply using their natural strength to break into the cockpit than there is from terrorists using weapons to try and shoot through the cockpit door.
Here's your stupid preznit describing the purported evil plot:
"Let me give you an example. In the weeks after September the 11th, while Americans were still recovering from an unprecedented strike on our homeland, al Qaeda was already busy planning its next attack. We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad -- the mastermind of the September the 11th attacks -- had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door, and fly the plane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We believe the intended target was Liberty [sic] Tower in Los Angeles, California.*"Perhaps the evil terrorists were planning to wait 19 months after 911, and only had skinny asian folks available.
1 comment:
I disagree with that above. 225lb man... 5.5mph and so on.
Normaly a FAA certified cockpit door is bullet- and (0.5*225lb*5.5mph²)human proof.
OK he may try it more often to impact the door but after 10times he left out of order with brocken shoulders, arms or whatever.
And then his colleague may try. Osama needs to spend a lot of money for tickets if he wants to get them inside this way :-)
and by the way... it would be funny to watch a 225lb guy try to accellerate to 5.5mph in a 20inch wide and 60 inch long cockpit aisle.
However, i´m pretty confident that these doors do what they are made for.
And please correct me if i´m wrong. I did not noticed any incident like the 911 in the last 6 years. So maybe it works (psychlogically).
now we can say it is more efficient to buy these doors than bombing countries back to stone age (as you may see in your daily news).
Buy more cockpit doors!
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