i cant belive the planes were hijacked by letter openers and knives, and no-one fought back? a whole plane vs some terrorist with knives, comon, or im missing something here.... fill me in

Knives/screwdrivers/letter openers and the like aren't exactly kid's toys.  Edged stabbing/slashing weapons are quiet and have a limited range - which doesn't matter much on a plane - but they are every bit as deadly as any firearm or 757 if in the hands of a criminal/terrorist.  Only difference is the range and the number of victims.  Hey, maybe we should register planes and require licenses... never mind.

true true....

Heard a lady say that today ( "I can't believe the planes were hijacked by knives..."). Think about all the hijackings in the past 30 years. What do the passengers do? What has the crew done? The standard act is to obey the hijackers, hope they let you land and you get rescued or are set free. I find it perfectly understandable/plausible that someone could hold a knife to a person's throat and get them to fly anywhere they want...within reason. I do not believe a pilot would fly into the WTC's under threat of having their throat cut.  Why would a pilot or passenger suspect that they were going to be intentionaly flown INTO a building? Never happened before. Some people question how the terrorist got into the cockpit in the firstplace..."They keep the door locked!". You probably won't get a chance anymore, but how many of you have ever really looked at the cabin door? How many times during flight have you seen the door pop open for the flight crew or stewardess? The opportunities have always been there. I'm getting sick and tired of the newsanchors asking idiot questions, and making ignorant assumptions. Same with regular folks too. What about the Intelligence community? There's going to be all kinds of people ranting about how they FAILED. Get a grip! It really irks me how Americans feel that no one, and no agency should do less than a perfect job. Here's some ways to appease the whiners:
1. Allow arrests and detainment without warrant and due process
2. Allow profiling - racial, ethnic, religious,political, etc.
3. Allow torture
4. Allow search and seizure without warrant

We shouldn't expect the intelligence folks to be more "perfect" than any one of us. The game is played with deceit, and directed  by politics. As I read the posts on this board, I hope I don't see a bunch of Whiners trying to tell the rest of us how THEY know how things should have been done. But then again, that's what the web is all about, right?
[:(!]

.

i heard there were 3 hijackers in one of the planes and claimed to have a bomb

all 3 hijackers sneak up behing and grab the female flight attendants and put knives to their throats, and say Bomb on board do what we say or they die

......WHAT ARE YOU AS A PASSENGER GONNA DO ???

there was a time in the airline industry when the aircraft all had an air marshal on board, armed and skilled. and the pilot used to carry a weapon in their bag... about time to let some one carry again....pat

Right on Paterpk. Air Marshalls should be brought back.

Air Marshals should be brought back on every commercial flight, domestic or not.

Don't forget to arm the pilot, and make the cockpit secure, a locked bullet-proof door.  The pilot's only concern is to fly the aircraft, and under no circumstance relinquish control of the craft.

... where is all this evidence that there were [b]ONLY[/b] "Knives & Letter Openers" used it these acts?

Isn't it sad that we have to go to that extreme?? Not so many years ago they would let passengers into the cockpit, just to look around. What is the pilot supposed to do when the terrorists are killing flight attendants and passengers demanding to be let into the cockpit?? What good does it do to land with a plane load of corpses? How do you armor a cockpit in a machine that has to be light enough to fly??

Maybe they should have a mechanism to de-pressurize the cabin without having the oxygen masks drop...

I'm not sure Air Marshalls on every flight is doable. More training etc. for airport security perhaps including "Air Marshalls" that can inspect passengers, baggage regardless of whether or not the person has passed through normal airport security. With the ability to put Marshall(s) on random flights.

i had this exact argument with Matt_S last night.  and he says that the sheeple mentality is the cause of this because people have been "trained" to let someone else take the responsibility for their safety.  and i have no doubt that this is happening and most likely did play a role is the behavior of the passengers.

but as i said on another thread, if you weren't there, you really don't have a right to judge what these people did.  the primal fear of "ohmigod, my life is in immediate, imminent (right spelling, i can't remember when to use "e" or "i", but you know what i mean) danger"  can be more powerful than any other emotion a human can feel.  and it can totally immobilize a person, even one who, in more rational thought, knows how "easily" it would be to take back the plane when the terrorists are armed only with knives.

we don't know what went on in those airplanes.  rumor has it that one flight attendant was stabbed.  isn't it easy to believe that the passengers thought they would live if they followed directions?  this goes way beyond a sheeple syndrome.  even if we didn't have a sheeple syndrome, i'm not sure that the average person would have behaved any differently.

besides, when this kind of second guessing occurs, it sounds like "they got what they deserved for not fighting back" mentality.  i don't think that's very fair.  NOBODY deserved this, not even a gun-grabbing lib.

OK, let's define a "whole plane", say one of those planes had 60 passengers, half are women, so that leaves a possible 30 men, half of those are probably too old or too young to do anything, that leaves 15 men, and half of those are sheep, trained by our government to be the victim, so that leaves say 7 men, and half of those are just cowards to begin with, so you might have had 3 or 4 full grown men that might have done soemthing if they knew they were going to die anyway, which they didn't. So a small group (even 3 or 4) of highly motivated terrorists with knives can easily control a "whole plane". Everything was planned very well by the terrorists, small passenger load, large fuel load, etc. I'm just surprised it hasn't happened before. About the knives, they don't even have to be metal, they could be like the "CIA letter-openers" I have that can be sharpened enough to easily kill/cut someone but will not set off a metal detector.

I can see that it was very easy for 3 or 4 highly aggressive terrorists that have already shown that they will kill to control a whole plane of people, that don't know they are going to die anyway, or that they are going to be used to kill even more people.

It's kind of a one-time shot though, if they tried it again, all the passengers would fight as they know what might happen (all passengers killed anyway and more deaths if they do nothing).