Slashdot Mirror

Will armed officers be put on flights?

Yes, FAA Federal Air Marshals who are armed and trained in the use of firearms on board aircraft will be flying anonymously. Federal Air Marshals are FAA civil aviation security specialists who are specially trained for deployment on anti-hijacking missions. The FAA will not reveal the number or identities of the marshals. The DOT is working with the Department of Defense to see if other highly trained agents may be deployed to augment the Federal Air Marshal force.

As seen on the FAA's website http://www.faa.gov/apa/faq/pr_faq.htm

Formally submitting my first diff patch, I fired this letter off to the Federal Aviation Administration, the overbearing bureaucracy whose oversights led to four plane crashes and thousands killed. The trip I took was to Defcon 9.

I took a trip to Las Vegas in July. My flight from Phoenix went normally except for one serious, disturbing mistake made by Phoenix security checkpoint staff. I thought it was funny at first that such as a glaring lapse of policy occured, but after the tragic events in New York and Washington, I revistited this story and I wonder whether four lapses in "Airport Security" caused the deaths of so many people today.

Suitcasenuke is the name of a computer I jerryrigged in an old Samsonite suitcase for portability. I have edited this account for clarity, the original is at http://telconnect.net/~sean/suitcasenuke/

Transporting:
The finished product is rather heavy and bulky--65 pounds give or take. It barely fit as a carryon. I took America West flight 113 from Phoenix Sky Harbor International to Las Vegas McCarran on a busy Thursday afternoon.

Approaching "SECURITY CHECKPOINT A," I cut in line by 10 people hollering out to the security staff that I could nto have suitcase nuke X-rayed as the machine is a very sensitive piece of electronic equipment.
Preparing for this, I had all the fixins to prove to them this frightening apparatus wasn't a bomb. Packed in there were my keyboard, mouse, power cord, vga cable so I could plug it into one of their terminals if need be. The screener blatantly ignores my request to pass it through and I'm eventually in front of the walk-through metal detector. This staffer does not understand English very will and I do not understand his natiove Swahili. Thankfully my brother had already gone through and was also trying to get through to the screener. Five minutes of this, and there are easily sixty people behind me in line.

Pressed with the queue, he grabbed the suitcase and fit it through the little gap between the metal detector and the X-ray machine and flailed his hand behind him, motioning me to 'go over there.'

I found myself staring at an unstaffed table with a plane to Vegas to catch, not blow out of the sky. My impatient brother didn't feel like further embattling the screeners and rigamorol. Off we went.

They didn't plug it in. They didn't swab it for explosive residue. They didn't even open it.

I smuggled--if that's the right word--a 70 pound suitcase right passed "Airport Security."

Makes me wish it were a suitcase nuke.

Now before you go out and arrest me, I beg of you to reconsider airport security policies. For example, arresting people who make bomb jokes at the gate is the embodiment of stupidity and maligned priorities. If I was really going to blow up the plane, would I be talking about it at the security checkpoint?

How hard would it be to smuggle an 18" polycarbonate machete onto a plane by maybe taping it to your thigh or sandwiching it in your suitcase between a lead plate? Even if I obviously brought contraband aboard, what's the chance the underpayed, undereducated, understaffed, and overly apathetic security screener overlook it or not know what it is? Or would he be too lazy and not even get up and make a fuss about it if he did recognize it? Don't say it's not possible. It happened to me. I did it at an airport with one of the best records in the industry. Phoenix Sky Harbor had two violations last year. Is this one Number 3? Which other violations do you not know about?

The FAA failed in its security measures four times the morning of 11th Septembenr and as a result, our nation mourns. Could that 18" polycarbonate machete worn by a survivalist or a law-abiding american concerned only with the defense of his legitimate fellow passengers ultimately ensure their safety? Barbara Olson's plane was taken down by two hijackers armed with cardboard cutters. Could a right to self-defense have saved United Flights 99 and 175 and American Airlines Flights 11 and 77 and prevented this atrocity?

Does the FAA honestly think it will stop a suicidal hijacker on a mission for Allah by having a ticket clerk ask "Have any unknown persons been in the possession of your baggage?"

Don't cast this off. Please. THe Administration's policies have failed America. I want to see them changed.

Well, the FAA just fined American Airlines a pile of money for lax security practices.

Check it out.

Here's a FAA page about the service.

Further inspection reveals that airports actually use two different strength scanners. Checked luggage goes through a high-intensity scanner, such as an Invision Technologies CTX baggage scanner. This scanner starts with a low power beam, but can send a focused beam (1cm containing 100-300 milliRoentgens) on suspicious areas if closer analysis is required. The focused beam is actually a Computed Tomography scan, of the type that takes 5000milliRoentgens to do to one's head, so it's still less powerful than the medical version.

According to FAA Regulation 108.17

If the X-ray system exposes any carry-on or checked articles to more than 1 milliroentgen during the inspection, the certificate holder shall post a sign which advises passengers to remove film of all kinds from their articles before inspection.

So you see, I wasn't throwing numbers around. I was making factual statements, you useless troll.

It doesn't cost too much to get into space, if you've got something small. For cost a US "educational facility" $1500. under the Get Away Special (GAS-CAN) program. But that's not what those people are doing...

Instead, they are on the Athena 1 rocket... I used to work for Defense Systems (bought by CTA, bought by Orbital... you know the drill), and my satellite -- GemStar -- was the first to go on this model rocket. The price of the rocket was many times more than our vehicle, and we played the usual space chicken game (where they threaten to launch a slab of concrete and then when we're ready, all of the sudden they weren't really ready). Finally, launch day, and we're watching the video and it goes up and and up... and after about a minute it's going at an amazing speed, and then all of the sudden makes a 90 degree turn. The thing is going so fast that the thrust of the rocket doesn't even affect its direction. The range officer blew it up. Oh well. When I was with DSI we also made bouys -- the joke was that we should just upload the bouy software to the satellites because they always seem to end up in the ocean anyway.

The reason for the failure was that the guidance control loop had some undamped and unintended oscillations.. and there was only a limitied amount of hydrolic fluid on board to control the position of the thrusters. Once the fluid was expended (it was just squirted out after being used), there was no more directional control.

After our flight, they changed the name of the rocket from the LMLV-1 to the Athena to distance the second rocket from this first failure. Ironically, the second one failed too.

Check out AST. These guys are the regulators of space acitvity in the US. It's a new group, and they're not clued in completely to commercial space yet. They're learning, but it will take time before they figure out a business-friendly stance

Here in Boston (and many other cities), the commuter rail is run by AMTRAK. So not riding AMTRAK means not going to work for a lot of people.

Not really. Amtrak only's got your name if you had a reservation, and commuter trains are *NEVER* reserved (heaven forbid). You either have a ticket (which often you buy from a vending machine) or a monthly pass. In the latter case, the pass will carry your name, but the pass is *NEVER* for a particular time or date, so they'd be hard-pressed to find you out; all they'd know is that you can ride between Southbinghamdeadtown and Boston for a given month...

You can always pay your ticket cash and give a bogus name (unlike with the FAA, there is no FRA requirement that each passenger shall have it's name disclosed), or just board the train without a ticket and pay cash to the conductor.

--

I was refering to Low-Flying airplaines, helicopters as well. If you don't think you own a lot of the sky, you need to take a look at a skyscraper some time and see how much airspace they've taken over above their property.

(2) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open-air assembly of persons, an altitude of 300m (1,000 feet) above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 600m (2,000 feet) of the aircraft.

I was refering to Low-Flying airplaines, helicopters as well. If you don't think you own a lot of the sky, you need to take a look at a skyscraper some time and see how much airspace they've taken over above their property.

(2) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open-air assembly of persons, an altitude of 300m (1,000 feet) above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 600m (2,000 feet) of the aircraft.

There's actually a competition on right now for the first person or company to successfully launch a Spacecraft into orbit and sucessfully bring it back, and then repeat it within two weeks (Project X I beleive, Sorry, don't have the URL). Maybe he'll win this. It's a 10 Million Dollar Prize. I say good luck to him.

Here is the official FAA regulation on electronic devices in flight.

The real big issue is to get GPS useable for the FAA's WAAS system. Right now other countries are not taking it serious because of Selective unAvailability (S/A or SA).

The other issue is the Europeans keep trying to get into the GPS frequency range. As long as its military system there isn't much opposition. If its a fully civil system used for aviation then its much more likely that GPS will maintain its exclusive use of the frequency.

Basics of how GPS works:
Sats send out the time from their atomic clocks.
The receiver figures out what time it is and difference between its time and the received time.
It calculates its position based on the time difference between the sats and their position.
It gets a better idea of the real time and keeps updating its time/position. The internal oscolators can be within 10 ns of "real time" even on the cheap GPS receivers.
To keep the bad guys from using GPS against the US, the sats will delay their time transmissions by some pseudo random time.
The device to do this has never worked on the older sats and is broken on others (I think prn #1, #20, #6)

As far as if the US military receivers are any better than the cheap handhelds, I'm not sure they are better. Trimble has had the best receivers in the world for some time and their best are not the military systems (but use the encrypted signal to help do some phase calculations). There have been reports that the better marine units were giving better position reports than the military units the last time S/A was turned off.

Also the Russian system GLONASS has a number of problems and may never get any more sats launched. They currently have 10 listed as working and another 9 listed as unusable and there should be 28 sats total. There had been rumors that Sweeden was going to by it.

You can do DGPS over the internet too.