“If you can do this three times, no one’s going to get on an airplane.” — Tom Casey, retired 777 pilot, quoted by NBC News
Bingo! We may have a winner! This is speculative, of course, but it makes perfect sense when nothing else does.
If you want to impose a new world order, first you have to destroy the existing one. Revolution is one way to do this, but revolutions are hard to control and can slip from your grasp. Other ways of disrupting the existing social structure include blowing up a city with a nuclear bomb, if you can get one; hijacking and bombing airliners, and flying planes into buildings; assassinating heads of state and other key figures (e.g., the pope); and attacking key economic targets.
Commercial aviation is such a target. If someone could shut down or discourage air travel, imagine the effects this would have on the global economy. Big business could still get around in its bizjets, but tourism economies would be heavily impacted and the petroleum industry would lose a major customer.
Let’s say Al Qaeda recruited a few commercial pilots willing to fly suicide missions for the cause. In this scenario, taking over a plane is easy, because the bad guys are already at the controls. To carry out their mission, all they have to do is turn off the transponder, change course, and fly the plane to nowhere until it runs out of gas. Poof, just like that, a couple hundred people are gone without a trace. Rinse, repeat. As Mr. Casey said, do this just a few times, and “no one’s going to get on an airplane.”
Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 is no longer just a commercial aviation disaster, or unsolved mystery, or inexplicable crime. It’s a game changer. First came hijackings, and it was Katy-Bar-The-Door, i.e. locked cockpits. Then came shoe bombs, and it’s TSA agents and luggage searches and body scans. If Flight MH370 represents a change of tactics for attacking commercial flights, or even if it doesn’t and was only a random act by crew or passenger, it too will change how things are done.
For one, I suspect tracking devices that can’t be turned off from inside the airplane will become standard equipment. Background checks of pilots, if they aren’t already, surely will become routine. Maybe there will be a push for better underwater pingers and more satellite coverage of air and shipping routes. But whatever happens, you can count on this incident to result in national security agencies getting even bigger budgets and greater surveillance powers than they had before the missing triple-seven took off from Kuala Lumpur.