Security theater has no impact. 9/11 had two important outcomes: locking the cockpit door and making passengers aware that hijackers will crash the plane rather than detour it to South America, ensuring that they will never again assume that sitting back and letting the hijackers do what they want is acceptable.
THOSE things made air travel safer. Body scanners and confiscating pocketknives did not.
Assuming someone managed to hijack a bunch of planes again, I doubt they could reproduce 9/11. The government would shoot them down.
Sure they could kill everyone on the plane, but a train has more passengers than a plane, and a determined terrorist could probably kill everyone on a train.
probably the likely outcomes of terrorism. On a plane the whole thing is demolished in a crash because of the kinetic energy involved in colliding with the earth. For a train probably not the same degree of destruction is attainable unless you like bomb a bridge or something of the sort.
> More than thirty buildings in Lac-Mégantic's town centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed, and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite. Initial newspaper reports described a 1 km (0.6-mile) blast radius.
sangnoir|3 years ago
If anyone ever uses a train to ram into the Pentagon, expect the security / security theater for trains to be scaled up as well.
Arainach|3 years ago
THOSE things made air travel safer. Body scanners and confiscating pocketknives did not.
gpm|3 years ago
Sure they could kill everyone on the plane, but a train has more passengers than a plane, and a determined terrorist could probably kill everyone on a train.
r00fus|3 years ago
jxramos|3 years ago
mitthrowaway2|3 years ago
Not terrorism, just negligence -- but a train can do a lot of damage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...