Back in my day we used LEGOs. And we liked it!

...although I suppose that's also only "assembling"...

So you're saying that you prefer the government keep naked pictures of you in that database that you don't want, as long as they don't tell you about it?

Ok, so you've listed about 100-ish (I didn't count) flights that have been hijacked in the past 60 years. The majority of those sixty ended up with either no one hurt or only a few people injured or killed. Contrast that with the thought that about 385 flights per day cross the Atlantic ocean in each direction. Over the last 60 years, that comes to a few million flights - seven million actually, but cut that in half because air traffic was not as dense fifty years ago. And that's just TransAtlantic. Only a tiny, tiny percentage of flights are ever attacked - and only a small number of those attacks are terrorism-related. Only a small number of attacked flights end catastrophically. Airplanes do not attract more than their fair share of terrorism; airplane-centric attacks attract more than their fair share of attention.

Which goes back to the identity idea: If the terrorist is just impersonating a pilot, he'd have to fool the other pilot, which would be fairly difficult, considering that the pilots are likely to have met and worked together before. How many times have you seen just one member of the flight crew walking out to the plane? Almost never. Usually, they walk out together, so a terrorist trying to impersonate a pilot faces a very, very high chance of detection without any security screening at all!

The United States Army teaches that you need three to one odds to attempt an offensive maneuver....

The interesting axons are oddly interesting due to interestingly odd effects.

...welcome our new levitating mouse overlords.