Airline hijackings used to be fairly commonplace at one time. Anyone who wanted to go anywhere simply pointed a gun at the stewardess and made his request. Heck! You didn't even need a gun - the airline cutlery was usually good enough. But then the terrorists got into the act.
The usual result of a terrorist hijacking was they had the plane flown somewhere, it sat out on the tarmac and they made their demands. Scores of television crews would arrive to cover the negotiations - a ruse played out only long enough to make it a newsworthy event for all involved - then the soldiers or commandos or whatever would swing into action, releasing all (or most) of the hostages (sometimes these things got nasty) and kill all the terrorists. This scenario worked rather well, for a while. The terrorists got to proclaim their grievances, the news media got to improve their ratings and the S.W.A.T. teams got to strut their stuff, and pretty well everybody got to live - except the terrorists, whose leaders were noticing that their ranks were diminishing somewhat. So they invented something new: the absentee terrorist! The object became not simply to hijack the plane, but to blow it out of the sky.
How do you prevent such a thing?
Sometimes the most effective solutions are those that are hidden in plain sight. You know those contraptions they send your luggage through - the stuff you intend to take on the plane with you? What they have to do is to make those things bigger - like the containers on the bomb disposal trucks. In fact, that's what we're talking about here. What happens is this: they send your belongings though this device, which would contain some ultra-high frequency signal, guaranteed to set off anything explosive. I'm pretty sure they must have that sort of thing. If they don't, then there is a huge incentive to invent one. We're talking millions of dollars worth of airplane, not to mention passengers with potential millions of dollars worth of lawsuits. All the big luggage and cargo should go through, also. In fact, you really can't tell about the passengers, either, so they should take a walk through, as well - single file, one at a time. You don't want to get the innocents, but it would be no loss if you blew up a bad guy. It would certainly guarantee his early departure. Kind of preferential treatment, if you will.
In the event that this method of bomb and weapon control is running ahead of modern sensibilities, there is a “Plan B”: all luggage - every last bit of it - is sent by another plane. Cargo only! That way, if anything blows up, collateral damage is kept to a minimum. Of course, it will create inconvenience and probably delays, but most airlines specialize in that already, so it's nothing new. If anything, it is, in fact, more efficient, because now you will know in advance that your luggage is headed for some place entirely different from where you are. And that could be Kingdom Come!
