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this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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Taking bets its because airplanes have much higher security such as locked cabin doors with limited access. But sure its the guy strip searching you for having 5 ounces of water.
How do you figure that a locked cabin door will stop a hijacking? Sure, they can't fly the plane, but the only hijacking that I recall that needed that was 9/11.
All he needs to do is let the pilot know that he will start killing passengers, until he agrees to go wherever they want to go. But that's not what hijackers even want these days. They want to blow up the plane and kill everybody, and that's easy. All you need is a lithium laptop battery, pierce it, and you'll have an unquenchable 2000°C fire very quickly. How many laptop batteries are on a plane? Gather them up, get them burning, and that plane is going down. That's a successful hijacking, and they didn't even bother to try to get into the cockpit.
TSA/Airport security exists solely to discourage the potential hijacker from trying it at all, and choosing an easier, softer target, and it has been very successful in that objective. FACT, down votes be damned.
Your example of a threat that TSA can prevent is to light laptop batteries on fire, but that is something that TSA does not stop you from doing. Half the people on any flight will have a laptop or tablet out.
You'd still have to control the passengers, and that requires threats and violence. The batteries just bring down the plane, they aren't the controlling threat.
And those laptop that are out? More batteries, hand them over.
Dude you are arguing against yourself... the scenario you described would not, at all, be stopped by current TSA protocols
Moreover, the bad TV show example about the highjackers threatening the pilots safely locked in the cabin... why would the pilots open or obey when the end result is crashing the plane?
Genius logic there
The reason hijackings where not taken seriously until 9/11 was because it was very rare for hijackers to harm passengers.
You litterally said it yourself. 9/11 changed the fact hijackers would use large aircraft as weapons of mass destruction. Preventing control makes them useless for that.
That won't do it. Thanks to an accident back in the 90's (I think) when an entire cargo container full of laptop batteries burned up in the cargo hold, airplanes are built to resist these kinds of attacks now. There are also limits already on the size of batteries that you can bring on a flight, specifically to prevent someone from collecting a bunch of them and starting a fire. When planes crashes from a cargo fire, it's typically because the crew is unconscious or disoriented and unable to fly the airplane, despite it still being capable of flight.
TL:DR - the passengers can't bring enough batteries on a plane to take it down.