I get unexpected visitors

A couple of years ago my Chief Financial Officer and  I found ourselves quite unintentionally stranded at 9773 feet on top of the Schilthorn mountain in Switzerland after the last cable car had descended for the evening.  The resulting five hour walk (him) and crawl (me) back to civilization contained many a humbling experience.  A lifetime flat-city dweller, I simply had no appreciation of the otherworldliness of high places until I found myself stuck on a mostly vertical plane, holding on to a stunted tree, being suspiciously eyed by a bearded goat.

I was reminded of this tonight when I checked the traffic graph for my blog.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com linked to the second part of the post on my recent travels and observations about airline security, and in one sentence managed to drive over 1,100 visitors to this site in just a few hours.  That’s a lot of influence.  If the U.S. government is still unsure about the best organization to receive our June 30th transfer of authority in Iraq, perhaps we should consider Mr. Reynolds for the job.  He’d certainly be efficient at reading through the daily ministry reports.

Many of the readers who came here from Instapundit left insightful comments.  I thought I’d answer some of them here:

Nick points out that the hijacking risk is still real for cargo planes and that armed pilots would help for both types of flights.  I tentatively, but not wholeheartedly, agree.  Opposition to arming pilots seems to come in three flavors (1) placing a gun in the cockpit makes it more likely that that gun can be used by a terrorist, (2) pilots do not have adequate training/background checks to be trusted with a gun, and (3) pilots should focus on safely flying the airplane – especially in an emergency – not on fighting terrorists.

The first objection is fair – and hard to get around.  Training and procedures will help, but ultimately it’s a tradeoff.  I don’t honestly know if we’re better of with a controlled gun or no gun onboard.  I’m leaning toward controlled gun.  The solution to the second objection is easy: more training, better checks. 

The third objection seems to stem from an action-movie view of a lone pilot in hand to hand combat with an assailant, with pauses in punching for just long enough to right the controls.  This may actually be close to the truth on both flight 93 and EgyptAir 900, but neither of those flights had a secure cockpit door.  I think the “shoot vs. fly” procedures for armed pilots would be pretty straightforward:  If there’s no terrorist smashing through the cockpit door, fly the plane.  If there is a terrorist smashing through the cockpit door, shoot the terrorist, then fly the plane.  Also, the vast majority of flights will have at least one co-pilot and autopilot.

Roosevelt, TomK and Dave wrote about the threat of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, otherwise known as MANPADS.  I’ve written about MANPADS here and here.  The gist: we should invest in technology to limit the risk from existing, unsophisticated, designs and mandate smart “kill-switches” for new, much more lethal designs produced by the U.S. and cooperative allies.

Researcher pointed out that “the metal detector with gain cranked way up would pick up the metal wires and metal detonator components necessary for a hidden bomb?”  True, but I wouldn’t put any of that stuff through the metal detector.  Even the shoe-bomber got around that, and he’s not the swiftest Taliban on the monkey bars, if you know what I mean.  Also, as Stef comments, metal detector tolerances are pretty much random.

Finally, Toren says, “The overwhelming and useless airport security is here to stay, because of the very simple reason that government jobs never go away.”

I’ve finally met someone more cynical than myself.  It’s an honor to make your acquaintance, sir.