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Well, if the airlines would go bankrupt instituting proper security measures, then maybe we need to rethink our national transportation system. You seem to favor a feel-good system of minimal to nil effectiveness over an system that would actually work because the latter costs too much. You must be a professional beancounter.

On the contrary, I favor a system that would actually work: arm the pilots (to insure a minimum of one armed person), have expert armed guards (randomly, since there just aren't enough people capable of Delta Force standards to cover all flights, and we need a lot of the people who are to be in, er, Delta Force), and allow qualified passengers (background and competence proofs would obviously be needed, with some room to hash out details) to carry on board.

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.