Twenty-one years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the same aircraft flaw persists that let terrorists storm the cockpits of four jetliners, murder the pilots and turn the planes into weapons of mass destruction.
Commercial airplanes are still not required to install an added barrier that experts agree will help keep terrorists, hijackers and other attackers out of the cockpits.
“The threat and vulnerability remains that we can repeat a September 11th today,” Ellen Saracini, widow of Capt. Victor Saracini, a pilot of doomed United Flight 175, told The Post. He was 51, a father of two girls.
The hijackers sent by Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden brought down four planes on 9/11, two crashing into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one onto a field in Shanksville, Pa, after brave passengers fought to wrest control before it could reach the White House or US Capitol.
The terrorists did their homework.
“The best time to storm the cockpit would be about 10 to 15 minutes after takeoff, when the cockpit doors typically opened for the first time,” the 9/11 Commission found.
Other than knives they used to kill, 9/11 ringleader Mohamad Atta “did not believe they would need any other weapons. He was confident the cockpit doors would be opened and did not consider breaking them down,” the report said.
While cockpit doors are required to stay closed and locked during flight, pilots step outside to use the restroom, let flight attendants bring in food, or switch crews for rest purposes.
After 9/11, Congress mandated airlines to fortify cockpit doors, making them virtually impenetrable.
But that protection is lost when the doors open. “The flight deck is vulnerable,” the Federal Aviation Commission warned in a 2015 advisory.
The solution? Flight attendants are expected to wheel a food or beverage cart in front of the cockpit door and stand by until the door shuts.
“It’s an absurd practice to have flight attendants use their own bodies as the barrier between the cockpit and the cabin,” Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, testified to Congress last December.
Since 9/11, the Air Line Pilots Association has called for the mandatory installation of “secondary barriers” — lightweight wire mesh gates several feet outside the cockpit that lock in place before the cockpit door opens and lift after the door shuts.
A video produced by airline employees and shared with Saracini shows the cockpit, without a secondary barrier, can be stormed in three seconds or less by one or more intruders waiting to pounce — even with a food cart in the way. FAA tests have confirmed the findings.
Two airlines, United and Northwest, which merged with Delta in 2008, have voluntarily installed lightweight wire barriers, costing about $5,000 each, on “hundreds” of aircraft, the pilots union says.
Roughly 5,800 jetliners operate in the US.
Meanwhile, legislation to mandate secondary barriers fell into a “bureaucratic black hole,” the pilots say.
In 2018 – 17 years after 9/11 — Congress finally approved a measure to require secondary barriers, but on newly built planes only, not existing aircraft.
The FAA was supposed to adopt the limited requirement in 2019, but skipped the deadline. It took the FAA until this past July 27 – another three years – to propose the requirement of secondary barriers on new planes. But after a 60-day public comment period and possibly months more to put out the final rule, it will not take effect for two more years – in 2025.
Saracini charges the agency has bowed to airline industry pressure.
“The airlines don’t want it, and the FAA doesn’t push for it,” she said. “They thwart the will of Congress. They don’t care. There’s no regulatory agency that is making the FAA do this.”
The FAA declined to comment, but officials said they must follow the “Administrative Procedures Act,” which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations, a slow and tedious process.
Meanwhile, thousands of planes currently fly unprotected.
In March 2021, several Congress members, including Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), introduced the Saracini Enhanced Aviation Safety Act to require secondary cockpit barriers on all existing passenger aircraft, not just new ones. The bill is languishing in committee.
The barriers remain the only 9/11 Commission Report recommendation still not carried out.
An old idea, cockpit barriers came up even before 9/11, said Mary Schiavo, who was inspector general of the US Transportation Department in the ’90s.
“The issue came up many times, but there was always such fierce resistance from the airline industry that proposals really never got anywhere,” she said.
The holdup? “Money,” she said.
After 9/11, Schiavo and fellow aviation lawyers sued the airlines for negligence — citing the lack of cockpit barriers, among other safety failures. The suits reaped more than $500 million in settlements for the families of those killed in the planes.
A 46-page FAA study said the secondary barriers on new planes would cost a one-time $9 million in engineering, $35,000 per aircraft to install, plus training and other minor expenses.
The FAA is finally acting, Schiavo believes, because it expects another terrorist attack on aircraft in the near future.
“If they’re putting this forward now, I suspect they have enough reason to do so. My guess is, they have new intelligence,” she said.
“So the threat is real, and it’s necessary,” she said of the barriers.
Brian Sullivan, a former FAA special agent, agreed, citing possible retaliation for six recent US drone strikes against Al-Shabaab, al Qaeda’s branch in East Africa, and one in Afghanistan that killed 9/11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri. In other alerts, author Salman Rushdie’s stabbing in upstate New York, and Iranian plots to assassinate Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.
“The threats are increasing quicker than we can do the protections,” said Sullivan, who also noted several attempts in the past year to storm cockpits.
Last September, it took six or seven crew members to restrain a passenger who went berserk, yelling “Allah,” on a JetBlue flight from Boston to Puerto Rico when he saw the cockpit door being opened by a pilot. It took six or seven crew members to restrain him. In February, an American Airlines flight attendant en route from LA to Washington, D.C. bashed an “unruly passenger” on the head with a coffee pot while subduing him with other customers.
Saracini fears more passengers and crew will die, and says she won’t stop her safety campaign until every commercial plane has a secondary cockpit barrier.
“I can’t look at another family member in the eye and say, ‘Sorry, I knew there was a vulnerability, and didn’t do anything about it.’”
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