Time for Mantraps?
You all must surely remember two years ago when I started this blog, a lot of the entries focused on the holes in airline security and the industry's reluctance to make fixes quickly. So picking up that old thread, here's a letter to the editor in Aviation Week written by Barney Greinke, one of my cohorts from college.

Every time I fly, I notice how easy it would be for a small group of terrorists to rush the cockpit while the door was momentarily open, get inside, and then lock themselves into this armored fortress at the front of the plane.

"Guns in the cockpit" controversy aside, there is one thing we can do to make airline cockpits nearly invulnerable, and now is the perfect time to do it. In the security industry, there is an apparatus known as
a "mantrap" which is commonly used in high-security facilities. A mantrap is an entryway consisting of a set of two doors, an outer door and an inner door, and a small passageway in between them. The locks of
the two doors are controlled from within the secure facility, and are electronically linked to one another so that both doors cannot be open at once. To enter a cockpit through a man trap, one would have to:

1) request that the cockpit crew unlock the outer door
2) enter the mantrap
3) shut the outer door and have it locked behind oneself
4) only then could the inner door be unlocked by the cockpit crew

A mantrap makes rushing a cockpit nearly impossible.

With Airbus currently developing the A380 and Boeing the 7E7, now is the perfect opportunity for these manufacturers to incorporate mantraps into their flight deck layouts. By incorporating mantraps early in the
design phase, a dramatic increase in security could be had for minimal cost, weight, and space.

Barney Greinke
Berkeley, Calif.

- posted by Amy @ 10/13/2003 10:42:00 AM