Hijacking
What's the likelihood I'd be a victim of a hijacking?
Well obviously the likelihood of hijackings been reduced significantly. We have changed the screening in terms of items that can be taken on a plane, weapons that can be used, air-marshals on planes, not allowing people to go forward of a certain location in a plane during a flight. Cockpit doors never opened, Cockpit door integrity in terms of the way its structured has been changed. So there's a lot of mechanisms in place that would stop a would be hijacker today.
Is there anything I can do to prevent a hijacking?
I would say that the only thing you can do, and I've seen this done. This, again, is about civil liberties. Something that doesn't look right should be reported. And with all due respect, we've seen that happen in this country a number of times since September 11th, unfortunately victimizing some innocent Muslim Americans or Muslims. It just didn't seem right, you've got to report it. That's the best way to do it. Richard Reid, when he tried to light his shoe bomb on that plane, I don't know if you saw the photos of him afterward, I think the citizens on that plane pretty much took things into their own hands. Unless you have several people on a plane strategically placed with a dynamic assault, they are not going to be successful. They still have to get into the cockpit, which is really hard to do today. The risk of hijacking has been significantly reduced since September 11th.
What do I do if hijackers try to take over my airplane?
In the case of a hijacking, if I were on the plane, about the only thing you could probably do is what they did on September 11th. People were able to try and make calls so people knew the plane was hijacked. You really want to, unless there's some way to come up with a plan as they did on one flight to take those people over, it's going to be really difficult to say what to do. Unless you've got the right training, the tough part about that is if you act alone and you've got an air marshall on a plane they don't know if you're one of the hijackers or one of the good guys. The other thing that's challenging about a hijacked plane is you may see 3 hijackers in the front of the plane, there could be 3 people part of that team that are in the back of the plane that haven't stood up. So if you decide to take on those hijackers, you may be taken out by other people on the plane that are their accomplices, so it's a very risky and tricky venture if you will. But a hijacked plane today, who knows what's going to happen to it, if it's going to be flown into a building or flown safely to a destination that you didn't plan on going to, that's a decision that an individual's going to have to make or a groups going to have to make with regards to whether we think we've got to act because we may die, and I can't tell you here and now how to make that decision because it's going to be as fluid and dynamic as what's happening when you're there at that moment.
