Ralph Lewis wrote:
>
> Perhaps I am thinking first world and I should be thinking third world. But
> I have no idea how someone puts together an operation like this and pulls it
> off with the level of intelligence in place today. Something like this has
> to be planned a long time out and some warnings should have gone off. This
> was not something a dozen individuals thought up last week would be a good
> idea to do.
Actually, all it requires is four pilots, 4-8 generic AK-wielding
terrorists, and one, count-em: ONE security rent-a-cop who is actually a
mole. 12-13 people, tops. Skilled people, no doubt, but being a third
world citizen doesn't mean you are still banging rocks together. There
are plenty of trained airline pilots in muslim nations.
Intelligence people say that they knew that bin laden was training
pilots to suicide crash airliners with simulators.
>
> Also as I said, 4 airliners not on flight plan? And no red flags are going
> off. If nothing else there should be a scramble to find and track the planes
> for their own protection in case some weird error is happening in the
> nations flight control system.
Our internal NORAD interceptor forces were disbanded in the late 1980's.
The F-15 squadron I was in outside Seattle in 1988-90 was one of the
last, and it was deactivated in January of 1990. Air traffic controllers
likely saw them go off course, and knew that their lack of response was
telling, but they had ABSOLUTELY nobody to tell to take action against
the planes.
Keep in mind that using airliners as lawn darts has NEVER been used as a
terrorist tactic (unless you count that Egyptair crash a few years ago).
The worst we would expect was hijacking followed by hostage taking and
negotiation.
>
> And all of this in a situation where individuals have allowed government
> intrusion into their lives, accept four hour check in times, etc just so
> this would not happen.
>
> To me that is incompetency beyond belief.
When your airline is responsible for its own security, and farms that
out to minimum wage rentacops, that is a recipe for disaster.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:28 MDT