Well, the most obvious solution would be to make sure nothing smuggled on-board an aircraft would be of an advantage. For example, the 9/11 attacks were largely triggered through box-cutters, even though they were only a five men against several dozen. One great man or woman with a knife or gun, or a dozen good men and women, could have stopped them.

That's not to say anything bad about the victims -- most of them believed they were merely going to be the next hostage crisis and then let free -- just that causing an offensive to fail is an overwhelmingly strong deterrent.

From a purely theoretical viewpoint, allowing and even encouraging the typical or above-average passenger to carry arms, armor, and be trained to deal with an offensive threat situation in an airplane would be incredibly effective.

Not that it's very likely we'd be able to initiate a cultural change to the level where even 5% (12 people on a Boeing 767) of the population would be willing to be armed, and capable of dealing with the psychological difficulties associated with what would effectively be a [i]massive[/i] hostage scenario. It also does nothing to prevent explosive or other sudden threats, which an armed response is unlikely to react to fast enough to prevent.

An alternative would be to encourage such a pathological dislike of terrorism that our culture as a whole demands complete and total revenge for any terrorist acts, including family, friends, and financiers, making terrorism significantly less cost-effective than it currently is. Encouraging religious scientific 'combination' possibilities at the same time would also reduce the drive to radical religions by younger individuals frightened of the lack of rules that many atheist scientific universities and countries have put forward.

.:shrug:.

I've been on this hobbyhorse since 9/11.

It would take the realization that chasing contraband is a chump's game.

It would take internalizing the understanding that there are no dangerous objects, only dangerous men.

It would take acceptance of the truth that, in order to secure a place or object, you do not need to know the identity of anyone, but you do need to determine the trustworthiness of everyone.

There might still be checkpoints, but they would amount to a place you might slow to flash a pass, but no more. The pass would not permit the state to know anything about who you were, but would reliably inform it as to your trustworthiness.

M