Security theater has no impact. 9/11 had two important outcomes: locking the cockpit door and making passengers aware that hijackers will crash the plane rather than detour it to South America, ensuring that they will never again assume that sitting back and letting the hijackers do what they want is acceptable.
THOSE things made air travel safer. Body scanners and confiscating pocketknives did not.
To describe the current behavior as "confiscating pocketknives" isn't even accurate - third party testing of how well the TSA actually detects and confiscates items like knives, guns, and (fake but real looking) explosive devices shows that they miss the vast, vast majority of items. Like more than 90% of them.
Nobody who wants to succeed would bother going through TSA.
'Known Crew Member' goes around TSA. Even TSA goes around TSA since they added the shiny metal badge on their shirts in 2008. Airport vendors bring in tons of product every day through side gates.
Strong flight doors which are locked and better procedures stop the hijackers.
Assuming someone managed to hijack a bunch of planes again, I doubt they could reproduce 9/11. The government would shoot them down.
Sure they could kill everyone on the plane, but a train has more passengers than a plane, and a determined terrorist could probably kill everyone on a train.
> Assuming someone managed to hijack a bunch of planes again, I doubt they could reproduce 9/11. The government would shoot them down.
They don't really need to hijack planes, they just need a few hundred thousand dollars and a NetJets account. Also, if you read some of the BlueLeaks documents you can tell the government is very worried about vehicle ramming attacks. The unfortunate truth is that anyone with a little bit of money and willingness to die for a cause if coordinated can cause massive amounts of damage. We are lucky that most terrorists aren't that smart.
probably the likely outcomes of terrorism. On a plane the whole thing is demolished in a crash because of the kinetic energy involved in colliding with the earth. For a train probably not the same degree of destruction is attainable unless you like bomb a bridge or something of the sort.
> More than thirty buildings in Lac-Mégantic's town centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed, and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite. Initial newspaper reports described a 1 km (0.6-mile) blast radius.
If anyone ever uses a train to ram into the Pentagon, expect the security / security theater for trains to be scaled up as well.