Stardate 20010911.1850 (Crew, this is the Captain): Apparently these jets were hijacked with knives; the security breach was the general policy of giving in to hijackers to prevent any injuries to crew or passengers. The assumption has always been that the hijackers themselves wanted to live, and thus if you gave them what they wanted then they'd let you land someplace and you'd get away. It's clear that this was a naive assessment, and it's going to change. The new rule will be that the cockpit door will never be opened even under threat of injury or death to a flight attendant or a passenger. It may well be that the flight crew will go armed from now on and that whenever the door to the cockpit is opened that it will be covered by a weapon. Airliners will no longer passively submit to hijacking; the crew will fight. It wouldn't surprise me to learn someday that there will be weapons hidden in the jet and that the flight attendants will also be trained to use them. The open question will be whether this will be publicized or kept secret: publicized both to increase the public's confidence and to deter hijacking, or kept secret to increase the effectiveness of the countermeasures should the need arise to use them.
(discussion in progress)Update 20010912: They're working out now more details of how the hijackings took place. It appears that the weapons they used were razor blades. The hijackers started killing stewardesses, and this caused the pilots to unlock the cockpit. The pilots were trying to save the lives of the crew and passengers. Certainly a couple of hundred people on the plane are important, but it's now clear that the jet itself is worth thousands of lives due to the fact that it is a weapon. From now on, protection of the jet itself must be higher priority than protection of the passengers and crew of that jet.
