Let’s be honest, the title of this post says it all. After all these years and the changes to how we fly as far as security procedures, turns out the best defense against would be terrorists on a plane is alert passengers. Despite the limitations on how many ounces of liquid we can carry on a plane and having our toes checked, bottom line is a guy can just strap the goods to his person and if he ends up next to a sleeping person he can send himself and all the passengers to a destination that was not on their itinerary for the day.
No, I don’t mean to be making light and I suspect had Umar the alleged suspect been successful my tone would be much somber. It’s just that after all the changes we have made shit still don’t work right. To insult to injury on Sunday’s Flight 253, a passenger had the misfortune of having a bad case of the shits…well in the new world order a bad case of the shits on a plane will have you shitting with some air marshals or flight attendants standing over you. Um….what kind of shit is that?
So I hear some of the new security measures at least on international flights (have no fear you know we will all be dealing with this soon) is in the last hour of a flight you can no longer get up and stroll around or take a shit. No longer can you have any thing on your lap, sorry Charlie no book for you. Time to daydream.
Look, am I the only one reading this shit thinking what is wrong with us? Is this the best we can do? Look, I hate flying and had been planning to fly in the relatively near future and right now that idea is so not appealing to me. Maybe I will bite the bullet but generally speaking flying is one of those things I only do when there is no choice, so I will keep you posted.
But back to the problem of keeping our skies safe, I have the perfect idea. How about we station a few corn-fed looking former high athletes on flights. The kind of cats you know still like to thump heads for no reason, see a would be terrorist would start acting shady and these cats would pounce first and ask questions later. Yeah, there will be the occasional fuck up…sorta like that poor passenger who had to deal with the FBI because of some loose bowels but by and large since it seems attentive passengers seem to stop would be attackers. Let’s just put more attentive folks on the planes, since I am not sure how making the travel experience even less comfy is going to so anything other than make folks even less inclined to fly.
Anyhoo, its clear we need to go back and work on how to keep folks in planes safe because the current strategy is just not working.