Actually, Donald Trump had this great idea whereby all passenger jets would be refitted and if any trouble begins in the cabin the cockpit door should be airtight and the cockpit crew would release a fast acting sleep gas into the cabin.
I’m not kidding.
WOW Bebe! That’s scarey only if the terrorists are aware of that and put on masks ...... but I think the air masks would drop anyway unless they ONLY do that when oxygen deprivation is in question.
I think the explosive devises in the doors though are relatively minor detonators that are used to blow the doors open once the aircraft is on the ground and also activate the slide so that passengers can get out in a hurry. These are safe-guards, BUT like all such devices, in the hands of some folks can be used maliciously
Actually, my car is “rigged with explosives”: They are there to blow away the panels that cover the airbags.
And don’t forget that those nefarious people in the automobile industry maliciously install spark plugs on nearly every vehicle that they sell, which cause a whole series of fuel explosions whenever anybody starts up their vehicle!!!!
Actually, Donald Trump had this great idea whereby all passenger jets would be refitted and if any trouble begins in the cabin the cockpit door should be airtight and the cockpit crew would release a fast acting sleep gas into the cabin.
I’m not kidding.
WOW Bebe! That’s scarey only if the terrorists are aware of that and put on masks ...... but I think the air masks would drop anyway unless they ONLY do that when oxygen deprivation is in question.
I think the explosive devises in the doors though are relatively minor detonators that are used to blow the doors open once the aircraft is on the ground and also activate the slide so that passengers can get out in a hurry. These are safe-guards, BUT like all such devices, in the hands of some folks can be used maliciously
As someone who works for an airline in maintenance I can say with some confidence that the devices rigged into the doors and other safety features would be useless for creating a real explosion. They are impossible to get at unless you have a full took kit and a lot of time. A lot of them aren’t actually explosives anyway but compressed air. Usually the most they do is disable the locking mechanisms so that the doors will open easily or provide a boost to help open the doors and activate emergency equipment. Pilots are supposed to know something about this stuff so the guy mentioned in the article either skipped his lessons or is really, really paranoid.
I’m not sure the guy in the article was referring to these explosives. I believe he was talking about new explosives specifically designed to take down an aircraft. The web page simply used a speech about safety devices in an attempt to make his concerns sound plausible.
I can’t make a statement about aircraft in the US but up here in Canada I’ve been over every inch of our aircraft at times during my work and I have never seen or heard of anything like that. I would be interested in hearing something a bit more concrete. Which is probably on the unlikely side of reality.
[quote author=“gray” date=“1173910519] ... the guy mentioned in the article either skipped his lessons or is really, really paranoid.
Can’t both be true?
Sorry, if anyone was going to rig planes with destructive explosives (rather than “explosive” bolts and actuators), they would do it to military aircraft to keep them from falling into enemy hands and obtaining technology know-how. And yet, a few years back, a spy plane “crashed” in China and wasn’t detonated. I guess the conspiracy-minded crowd would argue that that was to purposefully provide false information about our capabilities to China. I won’t go there.
Seems like that’s one we would have had the capacity to destroy remotely and would have destroyed, if we could do it to passenger planes, too.
Sorry, if anyone was going to rig planes with destructive explosives (rather than “explosive” bolts and actuators), they would do it to military aircraft to keep them from falling into enemy hands and obtaining technology know-how. And yet, a few years back, a spy plane “crashed” in China and wasn’t detonated. I guess the conspiracy-minded crowd would argue that that was to purposefully provide false information about our capabilities to China. I won’t go there.
Seems like that’s one we would have had the capacity to destroy remotely and would have destroyed, if we could do it to passenger planes, too.
To the best of my knowledge, military aircraft that have something like that built into them have it set up so that the pilot flips a switch, a countdown starts, and then the classified parts of the airplane self-destructs. More often, the pilot is just supposed to throw some incendiary grenades into the wreckage.
That is a bit of a double edged sword. A lot of times the military will want to recover the data contained in the a/c I suspect that aircraft that would have that built in would only be the ones that operate regularly over unfriendly territory. In the Canadian military we don’t put explosives into the aircraft. The biggest security hazard isn’t the equipment but the codes that are used to program the equipment and those would be programmed into a piece of equipment by ground crew prior to departure. While most of the equipment is classified it is spread throughout the a/c so it would be very hard to destroy it all without a lot of separate charges. There is also the fact that demolition could not be guaranteed because of damage pre or post crash.
Hey, I live in Canada too! Ontario though, although we’ve discussed moving to Calgary twice because a company out there keeps offering my husband a sweet job. He found a sweet job locally now, though, so Ontario is where we will stay for now
