Whoever did that deserves a few years in prison. Normally I'm not too much of a friend of draconian BS - but accurate reports of temperature, air pressure and wind speed are incredibly important for the safety of air travel.
It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-
"What do you mean, people used to just walk up to planes with their shoes on and a FULL 8-ounce water bottle in hand with barely any physical security?"
It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons, vs. trying to strengthen the commons against all possible adversarial behavior.
We ended up with locked cockpits that the pilots won't open for anybody, plus passengers willing to fight back due to the tragedy of the terrorists. We ended up with the TSA because Karen needed security theatre and the government was all too happy to increase the funding and scope of DHS with the nod of the useful idiots.
I don't even think Karen got involved, it was just the Bush administration seizing the opportunity for more corruption, pork barrels, surveillance and harassment of the population at large full stop.
When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from the unreasonable responses, but you can sell protection against them as well. A large portion of the economy actually revolves around this as a consequence of the shift towards service rather than production.
> But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with.
I think solving the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and religious tensions that lead to plane hijackings is a much harder problem to solve than simply putting doors on cockpits and forcing people to do body scans.
Just because it's impossible to solve a problem 100% doesn't mean that it's impossible to improve the state of things. Perfect is the enemy of good. There aren't that many people doing random chaotic damage, and it's not worth it to protect against all their potential harm.
Oh man, I thought from the headline that it was going to be about a new prediction wager on the site about whether the manipulator had used a hair dryer or lighter.
It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-