Armchair Rocket Scientists

Geoffrey Forden and Theodore Postol take a long, elaborate whack at the administration in a Boston Glob op-ed last week.

They're concerned about airliner security. They have a shopping list of suggestions:

It is time for the Bush administration to abandon its look-good feel-good approach to air transport security. Its failure to do so leaves the country in grave danger.

That's become perhaps the most irritating of Democrat tropes; "the Administration hasn't solved everything, therefore they've solved nothing.

Forden and Postol, however, will:

The sensible course is to use already proven technologies and operational procedures to build a truly secure air transport security system. One element of this system would be aimed at greatly increasing the situational awareness of crews on aircraft in flight. The other element would be technical and procedural steps that could make it nearly impossible for an aircraft to be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

Sounds good! What's it involve?

Multiple tiny video cameras could be placed throughout a plane's passenger compartment to record initial actions that might leadto a takeover. Wireless videocams could even be worn on the clothing of flight attendants. The doors to the cockpit should not only be strengthened so terrorists cannot gain access from the passenger compartment; sensors could be placed in the barrier to record any attempts to breach it. Biometric devices could be added to the aircraft control system so only authorized individuals could fly the aircraft.

And there could be a control room at the back of the plane, like that found in every TV station, where a staff would monitor the phalanx of cameras?

At a time when flight crews are getting smaller due to automation and cost pressures (look for one-pilot planes in the next 30 years), who's watching all these cameras?

Aircraft could also be fitted with a control system that prevented it from flying into prohibited space. The control system could use the Global Positioning Satellite System to monitor the location of the airplane and an onboard computer that would store the locations of all excluded airspace.

This "airspace exclusion system" could be designed so the crew could override it in emergencies but only after obtaining a "release code" from the air traffic control system.

More on this later.

There could be an additional black box on large aircraft to record all data from the many sensors. If the airplane was lost, this black box could provide much information for forensic analysis by security experts. If an alarm was set off indicating a possible hijacking, information from the sensors collected by the security black box could immediately be broadcast from the airplane through satellites that could relay the information to the ground.

All of these measures could be designed to provide the cockpit crew with timely information that they were under attack so they could take actions to prevent a takeover of the cockpit.

A chilling but necessary additional objective must be to provide the information we would want if we needed to shoot a plane down. None of our fighter pilots should ever have to face such an awful task without the comfort that their actions were surely needed to prevent a greater loss of life.

In addition to on-plane measures, there must be substantial off-plane information gathering. Areas surrounding planes on the ground should be monitored continuously. Even if such surveillance data could be used only after the fact, it would provide critical information when an incident needed to be reconstructed later.

So how does this play in the flying Peoria?

Fighter Pilot Guy (a high school pal and itinerant fighter jock), who sent the link to the op-ed, writes:

This is a prime example of an (probably comfortably well off) idealist who is familiar with technology that was developed or purchased with someone else's money (MIT's money?) that probably cost just as much as the actual aircraft he would put it in. (and I'm not referring to a Cessna 172) He is correct in stating that another attack would likely be our own fault because the means to prevent it are out there, but who is going to pay? The answer is "us."...we could equip all of our aircraft with the devices mentioned in the article. The problems with that are: when do we down the fleet for the significant re-work required to implant all of the tech gear, who will be willing to pay three or more times as much to fly to pay for it(see impact on the economy when the airlines go in the crapper), and finally, who is going to make all of the foreign carriers implement the changes? If there are planes without the techno-stuff in them, do we really think it will be that hard to identify them and use them?

FPG is right - and this article is just a symptom of a much bigger problem.

Listening to the debates last weekend - still a depressing thought - the line that's still sticking with me is Howard Dean's "I'd have spent all the money that's been wasted in Iraq on finding Bin Laden". According to Dean, he's have "found Bin Laden" by now. Leave aside pusillanimous Democrat fiction that "the" enemy is Bin Laden - that if you get him, the war on terror is over.

No, the noxious conceit being flogged as a solution by so many who will never be called upon to "solve" anything is that focusing disproportionate effort on solving your last problem - hijacked airliners, Osama Bin Laden - is any sort of answer. From some people - technocrats like the authors of the Boston Glob piece - I can accept that it's the response of a technocrat speaking to what they know. From others, like Howard Dean, I can accept the fact that they have an agenda, and are also idiots.

But from so many on the left, I hear things like "We need to focus on Bin Laden - he's the person who caused all of this", as if the "war on terror" is a police case, and if we just "solve" it and find the Perp, like in a two-year-long "Law and Order" episode, it'll be all done (or worse - we have no business going beyond Bin Laden).

Posted by Mitch at January 12, 2004 06:01 AM