Mark Rand wrote:

Not in the least. The captain of an aircraft or ship is the one in charge and
what he says goes. My preference would be to ban landing rights to any
aircraft which had an armed individual on board on the basis that there was an
implication of inadequate airport security. Remember that the 9/11 flights
were internal US flights. had they been british internal or international
flights, it is highly unlikely that the weapons would have got on board.

That's an odd statement - the knives that most folks expect were used
(box cutters, mostly) were nothing like the standard pocketknife that I
carried quite frequently through security at Heathrow & Gatwick only a
couple of years previous to 9/11. Security at all the airports I used
in England (Manchester, Heathrow and Gatwick) never batted an eye when
they saw it.

9/11 didn't happen because the US was being lax in security, it happened
because of the existing instructions to the aircrew to cooperate with
hijackers - you see, no one had ever had a hijacker turn a plane into a
guided missile. I don't think it can happen the same way again, neither
the passengers or crew are going to as complacent.