American and United Airlines and others sued alleging their negligence allowed the deadly hijackings

Michelle P wrote
What a crock of SH**! The airlines are not responsible for security, the
US Government is, Sue them. The airlines have never made the rules
either. Blame the government.

This is about the ONLY credible argument I have heard in favor of not
holding the airlines liable for the 9/11 incidents - they were
micromanaged by the FAA to the point where they could no longer
develop effective security procedures. Nevertheless, I still don't
buy it.

Airplanes are commercial equipment but are also potentially dangerous,
and they are dangerous in direct proportion to weight and useful load,
and in quadratic proportion to speed. They can cause damage by
impact, where energy of impact is half the mass multiplied by the
square of the velocity. They can also deliver explosive or incendiary
payloads, thus the useful load hazard.

It it well accepted in civil law that those who own and operate
commercial equipment that is potentially dangerous have an obligation
to take reasonable steps to secure that equipment in proportion to the
hazard posed. Drawing on my own professional experience, consider a
chemical plant. Chemical plants are dangerous, primarily to those who
work in them but also to those who just happen to be in the
neighborhood. A knowledgeable terrorist in posession of just a few
pounds of dynamite and a few blasting caps could cause explosions and
toxic chemical releases that would kill hundreds or thousands. These
things have happened before by accident.

So why are chemical plants not seen as potential terrorist targets?
Well, they certainly are. Why don't we shut them down? We need them
- they produce everything from mouthwash to gasoline, and shutting
them down would cripple the economy. So how do we handle the risk?
Well, in two ways - direct regulation and market forces (via the tort
process).

Direct regulation is OSHA (to which airliners are not subject - IMO a
bad mistake) and other regulatory bodies that set safety
standards. However, if an accident occurs and all you show is that
you did the minimum required to comply with regulation, that doesn't
protect you from civil liability. You must also show that you did
everything reasonable to prevent the accidents. I find it highly
unlikely that widespread terrorist attacks against chemical plants are
in the cards. The operators of these plant are already taking most
reasonable measures to prevent accidents, and that includes adequate
security to keep people who don't belong out of the plants. The
larger and more hazardous the plants, the greater the care taken.

Security at a chemical plant is NOT a joke - it's serious. Getting in
without proper identification and a reason for being there most likely
won't happen, and you won't be bringing much of anything with you.
These are hardened targets, and thus not at all attractive to a
terrorist.

The driving force is risk management - insurance. Some plants carry
insurance, others (generally owned by the very largest conglomerates)
are self-insured, but in either case there are professional risk
managers reviewing the operation, including security, with an eye
towards reducing the probability of an accident.

The FAA and the Airlines maintained the "play-along" posture with
regard
to our procedural response to high-jackers far beyond the time when it
was appropriate relative to the known threat. There never was
justification for a cockpit crew member of a two-person crew to leave
a
duty station to go back to the cabin, in-flight, to help sort out a
problem.

No passenger should ever have gained access to the cabin of an
airliner
while in possession of anything which could reasonably be used as a
deadly weapon. We had adequate warning of the disastrous potential
from
previous fatal incidents.

There is no doubt in my mind that reasonable steps
were NOT being taken to protect the general public. The only question
is WHY? You seem to want to pin the blame on the FAA, and if it's
really true that the airlines tried to do it the right way and the FAA
would simply not allow it (I don't dispute that this could be, but
that's not how it looks) then the liability rests strictly with the
FAA. However, to the extent the airline management was complicit with
this non-security, the blame rests there as well.

Prohibited weapons were almost routinely
carried through our so-called security screening points prior to, and
even after, 9/11, according to the Government's own tests.

Airline security was always a bad joke. That
shows bad faith - it shows that the airlines knew their commercial
equipment was NOT being secured, and were ignoring it. Who ran the
security process? Hint - the security was not made a government
function until AFTER 9/11.

Perhaps the
Insurance companies will ultimately help solve comparable future
problems and protect their investors by helping to establish realistic
standards of security for those industries in which they have
considerable exposure.

Given that this is what has happened in every other industry I can
think of, I am at a loss to explain why this has not happened in the
airline industry. That's about the only reason I am willing to
believe that government (FAA) interference might preclude effective
security.

Michael