About That Cockpit Door...

On which side of the barrier is our biggest risk?

One of my favorite voices as I became more conservative in my thinking was Mark Steyn. Just as I would come home to hear Tucker Carlson’s monologue at Fox, I would scan National Review for any article by Steyn on world affairs. Tucker lost his mind and now, on his own show, is suggesting that it would have been better for England to let the Nazis win. Steyn got involved in an ugly lawsuit with Professor Michael Mann, one of the leaders of climate change nonsense. He set up his own website and mixes world affairs articles with detailed reports on music and culture from the past.

Steyn made a very interesting observation a decade back. When terrorists blew themselves up at a Belgian airport and metro station, he noted that modern security arrangements worked in favor of the bad guys. As I have written before, the terrorists have a huge advantage over the good guys. Israel sent a couple of special forces divers to a point off the coast of Syria in order to kill a top general who was the force behind Assad’s attempt to build a nuclear reactor. He was having dinner with friends on his terrace when several bullets came inland and killed him instantly. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper, easier, and more effective to simply send some pineapples with explosives inside to a Damascus market and kill a couple dozen people? Well, Israel is one of the good guys, and it makes big efforts to kill real bad guys and not just regular citizens — however much they hate Israel and the Jews. The terrorists have no such compunction and kill where they can and as many as they can. Look at the attack from Gaza for proof.

In Brussels, as in the US and elsewhere, security procedures lead to massive lines of people on the unvetted side of security checkpoints. The Belgian terrorists saw dozens or hundreds of people waiting for security checks and blew themselves up. We have addressed one problem — stopping people from bringing weapons onto planes — by creating another: concentrating huge numbers of people in places where everyone has access. The first experience one has in entering Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv is to see massive lines of fliers waiting to be asked who packed their bags, where they come from, whether they take off their glasses while security looks at their passports, etc. Hundreds stand in the line before the line: after getting cleared by Israeli security, one then goes to the company’s counter to hand over suitcases and ask why he didn’t get a kosher meal as he had ordered. For this reason, Israel starts its security at the outer perimeter of the airport, with all vehicles required to stop at a checkpoint. Guys with big rifles stand a bit further back, and if someone doesn’t stop, he or she will become Swiss cheese before getting too far. Additional security is outside of the entrances, looking for any anomalies or strange behavior.

When four US planes were hijacked on 9/11, an immediate concern was access to plane cockpits. There were those who crowed that El-Al always had locked doors on its planes. The US demanded and received strong cockpit doors. What happens, in Steynian fashion, when the problem is in the cockpit and not from the back of the plane? We know of the Egyptian pilot who turned off the engines when his colleague stepped out. Then there was the German pilot who locked out the other pilot and flew his plane into a mountain. And now we have a full-blown jihadi lunatic trying to take out an Indian captain hero. If this had been on the ground and a Hindu and Muslim were arguing over the menu for their new restaurant, we could all laugh. But this was no laughing matter. The Omani copilot knew that there was an emergency ax next to his station. He had been fired by an Omani carrier due to his extremist Islamic views, and it has been claimed that his former employer warned Flydubai. Nonetheless, he was in the cockpit, and with the grace of God, the captain was able to open the anti-terror door in order to let in the flight’s rescuers.

One of the problems with terror is that it is generally rare but oftentimes horrific. There are on any given day around 140,000 commercial flights. One flight that goes bad, like the Flydubai 737 from last week, would almost be a rounding error when compared to all of the air traffic in the world. Yet, the sudden and violent death of 180 people would have shaken the world. When I used to speak about suicide bombings, I noted that the event itself lasts for, say, five seconds. And let’s say that there was, during the second intifada, a bombing every other day. Five seconds over two days is around 0.003 percent of the 48 hours. Yet, if a bomb went off and dozens were killed and wounded, it would be the news nonstop and might start a war or lead to other extreme outcomes. How much can we expect to get to zero on terror? We figured out how to keep the terror loons out of the cockpit. How can we keep the terror loons in the cockpit away from the controls? The Egyptian and German cases mentioned above would appear to be suicides. Of the hundreds of thousands of professional pilots, how many have suicidal thoughts? How many of them have marital and/or financial troubles driving them to the edge? And then we get to Muslim pilots: how many have jihadi sympathies to the point of crashing their planes to kill hundreds or more?

The media have already done their best to de-Israelize the story. There are claims that the relief pilots rushed the cockpit and saved the day. Israelis, whom I would trust far more on matters of life and death, claim that the dynamic duo was frozen into their seats by what was unfolding. They had to be encouraged/goaded to get up to the front of the plane to do their jobs. One couldn’t handle it while the other landed the plane safely. Jordan and Saudi Arabia denied landing rights, while the plane was running out of fuel. May Israel finally turn off the tap to Jordan and run the country dry. They are terrorists run by a midget king.

Apparently there are additional miracles beyond those I previously recorded on these pages. An Israeli girl going to the bathroom heard screaming from the cockpit and told the other passengers that the pilot was being stabbed. It would appear from lights that appeared in the cabin that the terrorist turned off the engines. This move actually saved the plane. As Yuval the Plumber raised the nose of the airplane, the reduced speed meant that the plane was under less stress and did not break apart. Apparently, the relief pilot turned the engines back on and kept the flight going. Had the engines been on, the plane probably would have ripped itself apart.

How do we protect passengers from pilots? In 2001, the question was reversed. Remove all Muslim pilots? Fire all pilots who convert to Islam? Monitor all pilots' social media? Insert Skynet-type protections to prevent pilot actions that threaten the plane and its passengers? I don’t know. Passengers are completely opposed to fully automatic planes or a single pilot. They want a backup guy should the pilot be incapacitated. While authorities figure out how to prevent the next Flydubai event, we will keep flying, and we will continue to fly with the men and women with those golden stripes on their jackets.

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