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I had a dream about a security system so close to being perfect that it would be almost completely safe. Determined people could get through it in a heartbeat. There's no perfect safety. If EVERY PASSENGER was strip searched and put in a prison-style uniform and deprived of ALL POSSIBLE carryons, and watched every second by computer, it still only takes one corrupt security officer or plane maintenance worker to make all that security nill. Armed pilots will prove the cheapest way of gaining the highest possible degree of safety. Still not perfect--who watches the pilots? But you know, ya gotta trust somebody sometime, and I think I'll go along with that.

Yesterday in the grocery story a stockperson walked past me pushing a cart full of cardboard cases: onions, potatoes, leeks. He dropped a box knife right at my feet. Such a surreal episode! Neither of us knew each other. I suppose I could have picked up the box knife and slashed him with it, if I were that kind of person, and he was just walking around with it after all--he could have killed a hundred people within half an hour if he'd been so inclined. Nothing dramatic happened--I moved aside a little, he picked up the knife, and that was it. Our society works because we really can, usually, trust each other to be what we appear to be. He was a big black guy pushing a cart of produce and carrying a box knife to open (wow) boxes. I was a customer pushing a cart full of mostly junk & comfort foods. And you know, it seems statistically certain to me that all or almost all licensed US pilots aren't going to go crazy killing people or crashing their planes.

OK, maybe reasoned debate is lost on you.

The pilot already has a job.

Giving the pilot ANOTHER job, one that requires him to pursue a high level of competence in a completely different field of endeavour, is not a good idea.

Instead, have a third person in the cockpit, one whose task, in the event of an attempted hijacking, is to keep the cockpit secure while the pilot gets the airplane on the ground. This lets people do what they're good at, and concentrate on that to the exclusion of other tasks.

I have read far too many accounts of gunfire getting unleashed at a range of two feet AND MISSING COMPLETELY to be optimistic about the pilots holding the cockpit by themselves without a lot of training--and I hear complaints about "too much training, not enough time for it" from airline pilots as it is.