So can unarmed passengers. And unarmed passengers have swarmed hijackers and taken them down. The hijackers' weapons (knives) are useless if dozens of people jump them. The doors didn't save the planes, the people did. And recall, the one plane on 9-11 that didn't kill people on the ground was the one the passengers fought back on. If they'd done it earlier, they may have lived. Dunno. But sitting still doesn't help at all. And armed passengers would shoot holes in the fuselage and other passengers, and in the melee the plane may crash. Use your hands. Can't blow out the pressure with your hands.

Numbers win against guns, if people know they will die if they don't fight. Best thing to stop a gun-toting idiot menacing a crowd? Crowd jumps him.Works every time. You personally can't, but three dozen of you can. Go for the guns first, grab those lovingly polished killing machines by the barrels and push them up/down and out of line, grab the hands, then his arms, and then pinch his corneas really hard and rip them out. He'll have second thoughts after that. Then kill him at your leisure. Or you can get really a good communal grip and rip his arms off. Or snap his neck. So many ways to make him stop dreaming of killing with his penis enhancing boom stick. Think communist Batman. Batman has the strength of one supremely trained indvidual, but you all have the strength of three dozen fat people who are REALLY scared and TOTALLY pissed.

Damned near every terrorist attack in the US has been end-times or anti-government christian cultists of one sort or another. Or racist cults. Or anti-tax cults. And we don't have anyone assigned to keep track of them. I blame Obama for caving in to the Republicans on this one. Doctor killers, Dominionists, Sovereign Citizens, this-land-is-ours loonies pointing guns at sherriffs from high ground WHILE ON LIVE ON CAMERA, and nothing happens and no one gets arrested, because everyone is afraid of them and their supporters. We don't even report on them.

But if a guy with a beard does it, on the news forever. Hell, the HS guys claiming someone was GOING TO join ISIS because reasons is national news for days. Every damned day it seems.

Astounding that you didn't know about this. If they had been Muslims, it would have been world news.
And, I win.
I correct myself: I am ABSOLUTELY astounded how little coverage this gets. ASTOUNDED. And this is me we're talking about.

http://www.christianpost.com/n...
http://www.azcentral.com/story...
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://www.charismanews.com/us...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

Noted. This time they are, and we should listen to what they have to say. But I do not wish to wait another quarter century for genetic repair technology. I know people who will die horribly. agony, from their genetic defects. We need the tech right. Now.

The White Plague, by Frank Herbert. An SF novel I made a rule never to mention online because it would give people ideas. A lone scientist splices a killer virus with a XX-chromosome seeking component and kills half the distaff half of the human race. And now, it can happen. Say, putting influenze together with HIV and letting fly. The possibilities are infinite, and you are right, someone will try.

Ever watch House? There are dozens of ways to physiologically fail into a psychotic or unconscious state that don't have to do with personality. We are meat. We may never know what happened up there. It may make no sense - a fungus or a genetic weakness that just happened at the wrong damned time.
What we need is three flight deck personnel, not two. We've two because we've cost cut our way into a robot plane with one pilot, at times.

Rules will always fail. Procedure can always be hacked. And was, you may notice. If it was a suicidal pilot, he could have tricked the the FA into leaving. Maybe he did. No matter how many attempts to manage humans, there can never be enough rules, and never a lack of ways to beat those rules.

Best way to have prevented this would be to NOT HAVE a door that locks out the rest of the plane. Let 9-11 go; that trick won't work again.
Another way? Airlines have cut cockpit crew numbers from 3 (pilot, co-pilot, navigator) to 2 (pilot/copilot) to save money, increase profits and break the unions. That MAY have more than a little to do with the fact that only one member of the flight team is present in the cockpit at times. We've cost cut our way into cheap fares and food-stamp-pilots.... and planes so short staffed that the illness of a single person can kill everyone.

A couple of days ago, a Christian musician family in Phoneix (I think) went obviously nuts and engaged in a massive firefight with police in a big box parking lot they were camping in. Their entire repetoir was about Jesus coming and the End Times - and I'm guessing, since they were all armed, they were the US Government-Obama-is-Satan cultists that are extremely pervasive in the Confederacy (the West is just the suburbs of the Confederacy, has been since the end of the civil war). We have a gigantic armed cult of doomsdayer Dominionists dispersed throughout the country, and the FBI taskforce that monitored it was taken down at the insistence of Congressional confederate Republicans. Our loonies wear ties and Glocks and praise Jesus and fear the negro President. Not even a little bit hyperbolic.

There are no self-drving cars as yet. There are prototypes. And they do fail.

As you noted, we really don't have self-driving cars. Here and there, a self-driving *car*, under escort. SD cars are something Google wants, and now everyone is trying to jump in on the idea, but it really won't work. Most will work, but the failures will be huge. Our capacity for denial will have to ramp up.

Zero. The 9-11 attacks worked because no one expected the hijackers were intending to suicide all along. We now know it, and they cannot hijack planes and succeed anymore, as no one will cooperate.The entire plane would swarm them, and rightly so. So they don't hijack. Zero hijackings prevented, not because of protocols, but because it's damned impossible to succeed, even without steel doors. We've overreacted, and now we've lost an actual plane because of the totally safe terrorism doors that even the commander can't open. Sigh.

Well, another fine mess you've got us into, anti-bearded-terrorist mass hysteria. Surely no one could have anticipated a suicidal or ill pilot locking the other pilot out of the cockpit. A german pilot, so not a terrorist, of course. Need a beard for that.

Don't bother modding me down, Fox News enthusiasts, I can post again, and yet again.

Well, another fine mess you've got us into, anti-bearded-terrorist mass hysteria. Surely no one could have anticipated a suicidal or ill pilot locking the other pilot out of the cockpit. A german pilot, so not a terrorist, of course. Need a beard for that.

Don't bother modding me down, Fox News enthusiasts, I can post again.