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Taylor wrote, "...and no one, not the flight crew, and not the air marshals, challenged their egregious violations of protocols about congregating near restrooms or standing up in unison as the plane started its descent."

I'm pretty sure that this is untrue. And BTW, if terrorists took the trouble to learn to fly planes, it would not be a big thing for them to learn to play instruments.

My intention was not to discredit the thread post, it was to give this story more perspective. They may have been a band or they may not have been. It had been reported in the days following 9/11 that the 9/11 hijackers had used phony passports, which the Taylor article had eluded to in the occurances on the Northwest flight.

"June 29 was no ordinary day in the skies. That day, Department of Homeland Security officials issued an "unusually specific internal warning," urging customs officials to watch out for Pakistanis with physical signs of rough training in the al Qaeda training camps. The warning specifically mentioned Detroit and Los Angeles's LAX airports, the origin and terminus of NWA flight 327.
That means that our air-traffic system was expecting trouble. But rather than land the plane in Las Vegas or Omaha, it was allowed to continue on to Los Angeles without interruption, as if everything were hunky-dory on board. It certainly wasn't. If this had been the real thing, and the musicians had instead been terrorists, nothing was stopping them from taking control of the plane or assembling a bomb in the restroom. Given the information they were working with at the time, almost everyone should have reacted differently than they did.
Jacobsen's fear was quite natural under these circumstances, and she has done us a service by pointing out some egregious shortfalls in our airline security. Danke Schoen, Darling. Let's hope the right people are listening.

I think you missed this part of the article.