I can't find a report of this ever happening, though I did find an article from December 2001 which pointed out potential danger to pilots behind locked doors. It also notes that the danger of an incident mid-flight can be reduced by having a flight attendant step into the cockpit whenever one of the pilots steps out.

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2001-12-17/news/0112160265_...

(Edit: Lest my nitpicky comment be misunderstood, it also talks a little about how strong the reinforcements are; I think your point about cockpit doors being extremely solid can be reasonably taken as fact.)

Passenger aircraft are supposed to NEVER operate with only one person on the flight deck, but rules are not always followed.

We don't know how many hijackings have been prevented by the locking doors. Are there any documented cases? We do know of a few cases where they have caused deaths, or at least prevented any chance to try to avert a disaster.

1: http://avherald.com/h?article=46c3abde&opt=0

Could that happen? It's not that hard to know that the doors can be locked, and if so, you pretty much give up on trying to get in to the cockpit to take over the plane.

(Cialdini cites research, which I'm too lazy to look up right now, that claims something as high as 40-50 excess deaths from car and plane crashes in the US per highly publicized suicide)

A co-pilot at the helm, or an unlocked door through which someone may come in and question the pilots actions could very well make all the difference.

Discussing any behavior, especially in the media, makes it more likely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide (Werther effect)

The interesting bit (from the book IIRC) is that the copiers will often wait some time so it seems like they are not copying. This is why the risk to subsequent air travel increases after some delay from the original incident. People are partially unpredictable, so it's possible to have an immediate copy as well.

With seatbelts and their introduction there were anecdotes about people crashing their cars into ponds, lakes etc. where their lives were saved because they were not wearing their seatbelts. I think it is human nature to want to repeat the one incident where the safety measures could have led to disaster.

Since you are so adept at research, can you find this one for me?

Recently a senior New Labour politician who was responsible for bringing in TSA style checks in the UK wise-cracked about how those that complained should be offered two lines at the airport, one with the body scanners, sniffer dogs, robocops etc. and another - to a different flight - where you could just walk straight on. He wondered which flight would be chosen to go on by those complaining types.

It bugs me now that I can't find the quote or remember whether it was Gordon Brown or some other politician.

Now on pilots, this really depends which pilots you are talking about. North American pilots, and here I am pointing at Canadian pilots more because I am in Canada and I am in the process of getting my PPL (for pleasure),however, I am sure this also applies to US pilots, very well trained. To get a job at a big airline you need experience, and where do you get the best experience, far up north where harsh weather, huge winds and tiny landing strips are located. I don't think that 3 years college will do, unless you are lucky.

I also talk to a lot of commercial pilots as my girlfriend is a flight attendant, so during the travels we go out and chat about everything.

As far as safety, over exaggerated, really. No one cares, well, people do but they shouldn't, because if someone wants to hijack I am sure they will find a way to do it. This is the big boys game on a government level. Tax payers are paying for scanners etc, whoever wins the bid makes them and they are sponsoring the next election. (I will not get into this here but you get the point). Scanners are useless.

This is an older video from 2010, scanners give better pictures nowdays but are still as useless as before. I got scanned at Schiphol 3 months ago, the scanner was not much different from the one shown this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idICUSiGcqo

It is great to fly small planes, no security, quick, and more fun to fly than a big airliner.

Opinions are personal.

"Recently a senior New Labour politician who was responsible for bringing in TSA style checks in the UK wise-cracked about how those that complained should be offered two lines at the airport, one with the body scanners, sniffer dogs, robocops etc. and another - to a different flight - where you could just walk straight on. He wondered which flight would be chosen to go on by those complaining types."

Not all fighting back scenarios involve crashing the plane into a field. In fact, now that cockpit doors are reinforced, most fighting back scenarios will end in the plane safely landing. There have already been several cases of passengers successfully fighting back before much damage was done.

tl;dr: I think fighting back is a rational response.

1) I know everybody else is thinking that theory. Nobody will move.

2) Bystander effect. Nobody will move.

In short, the one to act first will be me, 'cos y'all a bunch of cowards. (Hopefully not too coward to jump in once someone's made the first move though)

But what you really need to think about is- what if I'm not on that plane? What if every person on that plane is a coward? Will you wait in terror and lose your chance? Are you willing to take that risk?

Unless there's literally seconds until the hijacker will be untouchable, that's likely the most rational choice: play chicken with the other passengers, to see who gets desperate enough to act first.

Now, the moment someone acts, all bets are off - some non-negligible subset may quite likely follow the first person, depending on that persons social standing (people are more likely to jaywalk behind a jaywalker in a suit than one in less formal clothes, for example, if neither of them does anything else to get people to follow - our propensity to deviate from the group behaviour depends on how authoritative the person "leading the charge" appears)

Similarly, if at any point it appears that the hijacker will suddenly become impossible to take out, it becomes more rational to go first, out of the risk that nobody will act.

But the bystander effect is there for a reason: It is generally quite safe to do what everyone else is doing. Except when it isn't.

In terms of hijackings, as it turns out, it is quite safe: Most hijackings, even after 9/11, ends with no dead victims. 9/11 represented a small set of extreme aberrations from hijackings both before and after.

With that in mind, throwing yourself on an armed hijacker only becomes rational once it appears they'll otherwise gain control of the cockpit, at the earliest.

Anyway, I don't intend to wait and find out what the hijacker intends, and as the best window for action is going to be right after he/she walks by your seat, your window for action is small. When they are far away, you have to close the distance, which costs you surprise. So waiting to see if they are going to try to breach the cockpit is probably not the best plan.

Well, I guess if they take a hostage at the back of the plane and yell "take me to Prague!", it's probably not worth it, I guess there would need to be some attempt to read their intentions.

More importantly, security is provided by catching would be terrorists before they even get anywhere near the airport. Because otherwise they can do a lot more damage at a crowded security checkpoint than they could with whatever explosives they managed to mix in their underwear. This is a job for intelligence agencies, not for the TSA.

But really, if someone wants to destroy a plane, they're going to be able to destroy a plane. The question is not "should we try to stop people from blowing things up?" The question is "what are reasonable and effective means to stop people from blowing things up?"

Unless we have measures to prevent them from getting on the plane in the first place, and since no bombs have been going off on a plane for quite a while, isn't that a sign that the security measures are working?

Why not? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you are making a claim without backing it up.

This is like saying that we're seeing fewer and fewer occurrences of tuberculosis, therefore TB vaccines are useless.

If you have that data (which I'd love to see), there are still powerful arguments that TSA funding would have been better spent in many other ways (better training budgets for security/investigative personnel, more "soft" layers at airports, fewer kneejerk infrastructure upgrades).

Let's also remember what genius methods and techniques the "terrorists" used to hijack some planes....they "smuggled" some box cutters on the plane. .... The END ... FIN

I bet you if any one of you put a plastic craft blade, you know, the marker sized ones with the break away blades, in your carry on bag you would not be stopped or discovered; especially if you placed it with the blade on edge to the image.

Here's a tip though, never, NEVER ever will another plane be hijacked by anyone else using those means. Not only did the "authorities" finally secure the cockpits like it had been pleaded for years prior to 9/11, but I can guarantee you that anyone even attempting would be ripped apart by the limbs. I, for one, don't care if you were able to smuggle a middle-earth battle axe on the plane; you will be dead within seconds of pulling some shit.

That being said, I'm not quite certain if it has gotten any better, but just relatively recently it was still rather easy to access the runways and bays. Just saying, the phantoms we are fighting might get "genius" and pull of a "highly sophisticated plot" that my seven year old could plane and execute with just a tablet computer at their disposal.

Initially, the Bush administration and the GOP resisted the creation of a Federal airport security service. They were not at all excited about a big new (particularly unionized) government workforce. But the Democrats fought for it and won that political argument. Here's a contemporaneous news account that covers the basics: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=87570

How did you end up remembering it differently?

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2001/roll425.xml

No, they didn't. By then, Senator Jim Jeffords had become an independent, caucusing with the Democrats and giving them a one-vote majority control of the chamber. Also, FWIW, Norm Mineta was the token Democrat in the Bush cabinet.

And of course everyone voted for the bill once it was clear it would pass. Who wanted to be against enhanced airline security?

I'm not saying the GOP put up the fight of the century on the TSA, far from it. But it's a mischaracterization of history to say that Bush demanded a dramatic expansion of the Federal workforce as some kind of economic smokescreen. If that were so, you'd expect to find accounts of Democrats at least raising token opposition to this brilliant political stratagem.

The transfer of existing security responsibilities from airlines to the federal government wasn't a make-work program, it was a measure to eliminate potential airline liability for future security failures.

It was about the economy, because reducing the airlines liability risk going forward was one of many steps taken to help the airline industry, but it wasn't primarily a "make-work" program.

First time I was travelling with it, I went to check it in, and they looked at me as if I was stupid. Clearly no terrorist has tried to use a huge umbrella as a pike yet, so it's not yet a risk. If I was a terrorist, testing a suitable set of objects with enough sharpened metal pieces for whether or not they'd ask me to check them in would be trivial - any terrorists being stopped by their lack of ability to bring something sharp on are so dumb they'd be stopped by someone drawing a stop sign in crayons and insisting they're not allowed to pass.

So the terrorists are either really stupid, there aren't that many of them, or they, like you, are smart enough to realise that they'd better have some pretty horrible weapons to be able to survive a hijack attempt in a post-9/11 world.

In other words, it's not even about stopping sharp items, but about giving the appearance of stopping a suitable set of objects that will keep people concerned about terror threats.

What about liquids? Pretty much every trip I end up forgetting some bottle or other of liquids, generally a half litre bottler of some drink, often because the mother of my child keeps putting bottles in his bag that I don't notice until after security. Not once have they been noticed at the security checks.

So it's a show, as those who do want to get liquids past can just put them in their carry on and send it through with good odds of being able to walk straight on. If they cared, they'd do better. But they don't care, as this is not about stopping a viable plot, but about keeping up appearances.

Meanwhile my 4 year old was picked out for secondary screening when we flew to visit my mother for christmas, without setting off the metal detectors, and had to pass his shoes through and go through the new scanners, and get patted down; I was furious, but didn't want to upset or scare him or risk messing up his christmas by making a fuss about it; and when we'd gone through, I found a full drinks bottle in his bag that they'd missed.

My point is not that it'd be a great weapon - it's not. But compared to the stuff they are confiscating, it's miles ahead in terms of potential damage.

It demonstrates either a total lack of critical thinking when deciding what to allow, or how little this has to do with security, or both.

Personally I'm quite pleased they don't ban my umbrella, but I'd prefer it if they removed most stuff from the list of banned items.

That's funny, because I got searched more thoroughly leaving the USA than when I was flying to the USA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Flight_705

"About twenty minutes after takeoff, as the flight crew carried on a casual conversation, Calloway entered the flight deck and commenced his attack. Every member of the crew took multiple hammer blows which fractured [the flight crew's] skulls. A lengthy struggle ensued with the flight engineer and captain as Tucker, also an ex-Navy pilot, performed extreme aerial maneuvers with the aircraft, at times flying upside down, with the intent to keep the hijacker off-balance."

It worked, too. Everyone survived.