Replies

Exactly what sized weapon was one allowed to carry on to a flight before 9/11. I was amazed that my bag was X-Rayed there and nobody asked to see my Gerber AP tool. I carried the thing through Logan, and Memphis in July 2001.

Actually, your question is a good one, and it's part of the fallacy that's grown up about airport security, and Logan in particular about 9/11.

Before 9/11 it was perfectly legal to carry knives (and box cutters) on airplanes. I carried a leatherman tool and a boxcutter in my regular carry on stuff for years.

Regarding Logan... the 9/11 hijackers didn't go through security at Logan. They flew in on a small commuter plane from somewhere else (Portland, Maine, I think?) to Logan. They would have already been inside the terminal and would not have had to go through security again.

They remain, for some reason, a couple of commonly repeated misconceptions about 9/11 and it's about time to get them out of the way.

All that said... I still maintain that the basic problem on 9/11 wasn't that there were too many weapons on those planes-- but that there were too few. A couple of hundred passengers on a jet that have some kind of weapons to use would make any future hijacking completely unthinkable.