Through the Cockpit Doors July 22, 2004 © jim moore 2004
[July 29, scroll down for PS Prologue]
Hopefully, my tinkering with his title won't be disturbing enough to Lewis Carroll to cause him to turn completely over in his grave, but I am willing to risk a minor complaint because the concept is too useful to pass up. Alice might not have considered the mirror unusual when she first saw it, and its appearance probably didn't change much when she went through, but strange things began to happen once she passed its surface. Nothing, absolutely nothing in today's changed world is more vital to our national security than the information that can be gleaned from the singular event of the terrorists passing through the cockpit doors. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is more plagued with pitfalls than attempts to provide simple solutions for complex problems. As the Red Queen might have said "if you had a lick of common sense, you wouldn't even try", but as my mentor Don Quixote once said, "Charge" !
Cockpit doors have been there almost since the beginning of passenger planes, but it was not until the hijackers went through them on September 11th. that they achieved totemic status. Shortly after the attack, Department of Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta formed a Rapid Response Team on Aircraft Security. The team quickly focused on the vulnerability of cockpit doors, and by October 9, 2001, the FAA published the first of its Special Federal Aviation Regulations (SFARS). The first SFARS urged rapid implementation of "Phase I", the goal of which was to fit cockpit doors with steel bars and locking devices. The FAA also granted the airlines procedural variances to expedite Phase I. The airlines modified 4,000 airplanes within 45 days of the publication, and by January, 98 percent of the airlines had installed reinforced cockpit doors. The implementation of Phase I was a landmark effort in terms of cooperation between the airlines, the manufacturers, and the FAA.
President Bush formed the Department of Homeland Security to centralize our nation's response to new world dangers few had imagined prior to 9/11. Phase IIof the cockpit door reinforcement effort soon became just one cog in the enormous bureaucratic machine tasked with improving our security. The practical effect of Phase I went unnoticed, but the headlines should have screamed what Phase I really did. If in September of 2001, cockpit doors of passenger airlines had been in the condition they were in by January of 2002, not one of the 2,710 people who died in the twin towers and the pentagon would have died. Put another way, the fatal security flaw that existed on September 11th. no longer existed four months later. Problem solved. The terrorists used simple mechanical devices to exploit a weakness that could have been fixed with simple mechanical devices. Our leaders failed to notice that the problem was solved. They hardly gave the cockpit doors a second glance as they went crashing through to a world view as strange and unreal as the world Alice found on the other side of the looking glass.
If the cockpit doors get the attention they deserve; if the lessons learned from them serve to improve our security, it will be up to us. Let's just sit down here beside the September 10th. cockpit doors and see what we can observe. It is not very comfortable sitting here in a hard metal doorway, especially so when all the important folks have moved on. The important folks and the expert opinions have busied themselves elsewhere. Fortunately, we have some handy skills that the government failed to use. We became aware of those skills in a most mundane way, by watching television. Sargent Friday relied primarily on his gut reaction to the information he got from his "just the facts, mam." Forensic science has expanded the evaluation of evidence from detective hunches to the laboratory. The investigation team also has a vital new member, the profiler.
The passage of the terrorists through the cockpit is a gold mine of information not recognized or utilized by our leaders. The government's response was in fact programmed, a ritualistic exercise that followed steps as rigid as any religious ceremony. Understanding why this happened, and the mistakes it led to requires attention to many things we usually scarcely notice. The next chapters will look at some initial responses by our government, why they were wrong, why we did not question them, how those errors developed, and what we can do about them. This is not a conspiracy theory missive- no men in black or hidden cabals guiding the course of humanity, no extraterrestrial influences, just a quiet and thorough look at information at our disposal. The only high tech device we need is the same device the terrorists used, a computer, no doubt quite similar to the one you are sitting in front of. We will start the process by using our new found forensic and profiler skills to examine our governments initial responses to 9/11.
PS Prologue: Prologue Postscript Punch Line Paragraph. (or two)
We are not going to start there after all. I decided to tell you what I am up to rather than attempt to herd you unobtrusively toward some cryptic conclusion. Bottom line in the blame game was best expressed by Pogo " we have seen the enemy and they is us". The cockpit doors seemed to me to be a good metaphor to look into this new and dangerous world we live in and how things got this way. First, the danger itself is somewhat illusionary. The world is no where near as dangerous as it was between October 22 and 28 of 1962 when Kennedy and Khrushchev locked horns over the Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. It was even more dangerous after the meteor impact at Chicxulub along the Mexican coast sometime between the Cretaceous and Tertiary age, particularly so for large mammals which probably would have included us. Or how about the month or so after Noah had battened down the hatches, no fun then. But nonetheless, things do seem to be requiring our attention.
To start at the beginning of my view of things. I don't think we have any solid evidence that consciousness is anything other than a localized anomaly here on earth. Since we have got it, we probably exaggerate its importance in terms of the universe. But the closer we look at far away big stuff or up close little stuff, the less organized it gets. There are of course patterns in the universe, but whether there is an overriding consciousness in charge of their arrangement is another matter. Suit yourself, don't mean to start a fuss about that.
If I were to give a name to my thing, I would call it a theory about the evolution of organizational structure. Many of my ideas developed from readings on chaos theory and some on statistical theory and some on anthropological theories and some were delivered by mystical gofers from the dream world. Though some may yell "stop thief" as I appropriate their terminology for my metaphorical purposes, I can do little else because I am neither scientist nor mathematician. [Of course what lies just beyond the current reach of any science discipline is also metaphorical, but that ain't got nothing to do with us here.]
Imagine ourselves in a totally dark cavern in a deep cave. Developing an artifact to enable us to see in such a place involves some very sophisticated science. Even so, the most elegant science cannot explain everything that occurs in the process. But if essentially everything is in working order, even the most simple of us can turn on a flashlight and immediately see in the dark. The final test of the science is whether light occurs and we can then see. If the science is wrong, the light won't come on. The point of that is that the final arbiter of the validity of scientific theory is whether or not it works here in the real world and whether we can know that it does. We have learned not to think about things like that, and to turn both the development and the evaluation of much of our lives over to the experts. As a result, the experts have developed a major case of arrogance. While those with outstanding expertise can be excused some degree of arrogance, that is true only when the arrogance results from competency. Unfortunately, many of the paths we now travel are the result of incompetent arrogance. We each have the right and the responsibility to take incompetent arrogance to task, which is basically what Pogo told us.
My first purloined concept is the normal distribution. [When I first wrote this paragraph some months ago, I should have called it the myth of the normal distribution. Upon further reflection, the normal distribution does serve a continuing purpose in statistics, but the normal distribution is not, nor can it be, a description of the real world. What it represents in terms of my ideas is that it is the way we perceive reality. We organize ourselves, as though the normal distribution reflects ourselves, so its reality comes from the way we use it. The percentage of Tom Thumbs is not matched by an equal percentage of Yao Mings. I may be forced to throw away yet another promising metaphor. Sigh.]Suppose we decide to count something, say the height of everyone in a given hundred mile circle. All the heights of the same measurement are transferred to a graph stacked one on top of the other. The stack with the most elements (people), the most common height, becomes the central stack, and distributed to the left and right of the center stack are stacks made up of folks either shorter or taller than the folks in the central stack. If we were part of this distribution, most of us would be crowded together toward the center, or the highest point in the bell shaped curve that depicts the normal distribution. I tend to think of the bell shaped curve in four dimensions, but I am not sure that is necessary or accurate. Moving away from the center in either direction, fewer and fewer folks would be part of the same stack. On one end standing alone, or almost so, would be Tom Thumb and on the other end would be Yao Ming. All we need to know for our purposes is that the density of whatever we are counting increases with proximity to the center of the bell shaped curve, and of course the density of whatever we are counting decreases as we move away from the center. The only other part of the normal distribution we need is to know is that the curve never actually touches the base line. The idea that someone shorter than Tom Thumb or taller than Yao Ming would come along and want to be included is not very likely, but it is possible.
Now let's deftly lift a term from chaos theory called fractal geometry. You may well be familiar with software that utilizes fractal geometry to create some fantastic self-similar forms. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, all we folks standing around under the bell may be unique in some respects, but we are all also basically quite similar, enough so that we could all be instantly recognized as people, even though the resulting picture might not be considered a good example of nonlinear art. An example frequently given is that if one takes a picture of a coastline, and then takes a series of pictures at higher and higher magnifications, the basic shape of the line separating the water from the land would be similar in each picture.
My personal favorite term in our bag of loot is the strange attractor. which is sort of a scientific term for "birds of a feather flock together". The strange part comes from whatever it is that makes them do that, and why they don't seem to be birds of a feather until they are flocked together, or why they sometimes get spooked for no apparent reason and fly off in every direction.
Finally there is the soliton. In our example, sometimes some weirdo comes charging through the almost end of the curve, and apparently stops where he or she damn well pleases, no matter how uncomfortable it makes the folks that are supposed to be there feel. Back in the sixties, if we had chaos theory terminology, we might have called the weirdo soliton a nonlinear streaker. We would be taught that the polite thing to do was simply to ignore such miscreants.
When we finish with our look at the cockpit doors, we may see our present dilemma more as a function of the natural evolution of the organizational structure we call civilization rather than some devious conspiracy by [Fill in the blank with your favorite devil, if you are a democrat you might pick Bush or greed, and if you are a republican you might pick Clinton or liberalism]. In either case you would be wrong; we didn't get here as the result of a conspiracy. Not that there are not cabals that attempt a conspiratorial takeover, just that they are not competent enough to pull it off. Chaos theory sees to that.
One other thing, my cyberspace glob seems to be in the process of forming a mini book. I promise to try and use good science and good sense in what I say, but at this point I am not up to developing points fully, or citing sources. As long as I am stealing stuff I might as well lift a term from the social sciences and call this a pilot book. Feel free to get up and wander around, the show can't really go on without your participation
Chapter 1
Existential Evasion [The link will appear here when I get it ready].
[July 29, scroll down for PS Prologue]
Hopefully, my tinkering with his title won't be disturbing enough to Lewis Carroll to cause him to turn completely over in his grave, but I am willing to risk a minor complaint because the concept is too useful to pass up. Alice might not have considered the mirror unusual when she first saw it, and its appearance probably didn't change much when she went through, but strange things began to happen once she passed its surface. Nothing, absolutely nothing in today's changed world is more vital to our national security than the information that can be gleaned from the singular event of the terrorists passing through the cockpit doors. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is more plagued with pitfalls than attempts to provide simple solutions for complex problems. As the Red Queen might have said "if you had a lick of common sense, you wouldn't even try", but as my mentor Don Quixote once said, "Charge" !
Cockpit doors have been there almost since the beginning of passenger planes, but it was not until the hijackers went through them on September 11th. that they achieved totemic status. Shortly after the attack, Department of Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta formed a Rapid Response Team on Aircraft Security. The team quickly focused on the vulnerability of cockpit doors, and by October 9, 2001, the FAA published the first of its Special Federal Aviation Regulations (SFARS). The first SFARS urged rapid implementation of "Phase I", the goal of which was to fit cockpit doors with steel bars and locking devices. The FAA also granted the airlines procedural variances to expedite Phase I. The airlines modified 4,000 airplanes within 45 days of the publication, and by January, 98 percent of the airlines had installed reinforced cockpit doors. The implementation of Phase I was a landmark effort in terms of cooperation between the airlines, the manufacturers, and the FAA.
President Bush formed the Department of Homeland Security to centralize our nation's response to new world dangers few had imagined prior to 9/11. Phase IIof the cockpit door reinforcement effort soon became just one cog in the enormous bureaucratic machine tasked with improving our security. The practical effect of Phase I went unnoticed, but the headlines should have screamed what Phase I really did. If in September of 2001, cockpit doors of passenger airlines had been in the condition they were in by January of 2002, not one of the 2,710 people who died in the twin towers and the pentagon would have died. Put another way, the fatal security flaw that existed on September 11th. no longer existed four months later. Problem solved. The terrorists used simple mechanical devices to exploit a weakness that could have been fixed with simple mechanical devices. Our leaders failed to notice that the problem was solved. They hardly gave the cockpit doors a second glance as they went crashing through to a world view as strange and unreal as the world Alice found on the other side of the looking glass.
If the cockpit doors get the attention they deserve; if the lessons learned from them serve to improve our security, it will be up to us. Let's just sit down here beside the September 10th. cockpit doors and see what we can observe. It is not very comfortable sitting here in a hard metal doorway, especially so when all the important folks have moved on. The important folks and the expert opinions have busied themselves elsewhere. Fortunately, we have some handy skills that the government failed to use. We became aware of those skills in a most mundane way, by watching television. Sargent Friday relied primarily on his gut reaction to the information he got from his "just the facts, mam." Forensic science has expanded the evaluation of evidence from detective hunches to the laboratory. The investigation team also has a vital new member, the profiler.
The passage of the terrorists through the cockpit is a gold mine of information not recognized or utilized by our leaders. The government's response was in fact programmed, a ritualistic exercise that followed steps as rigid as any religious ceremony. Understanding why this happened, and the mistakes it led to requires attention to many things we usually scarcely notice. The next chapters will look at some initial responses by our government, why they were wrong, why we did not question them, how those errors developed, and what we can do about them. This is not a conspiracy theory missive- no men in black or hidden cabals guiding the course of humanity, no extraterrestrial influences, just a quiet and thorough look at information at our disposal. The only high tech device we need is the same device the terrorists used, a computer, no doubt quite similar to the one you are sitting in front of. We will start the process by using our new found forensic and profiler skills to examine our governments initial responses to 9/11.
PS Prologue: Prologue Postscript Punch Line Paragraph. (or two)
We are not going to start there after all. I decided to tell you what I am up to rather than attempt to herd you unobtrusively toward some cryptic conclusion. Bottom line in the blame game was best expressed by Pogo " we have seen the enemy and they is us". The cockpit doors seemed to me to be a good metaphor to look into this new and dangerous world we live in and how things got this way. First, the danger itself is somewhat illusionary. The world is no where near as dangerous as it was between October 22 and 28 of 1962 when Kennedy and Khrushchev locked horns over the Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. It was even more dangerous after the meteor impact at Chicxulub along the Mexican coast sometime between the Cretaceous and Tertiary age, particularly so for large mammals which probably would have included us. Or how about the month or so after Noah had battened down the hatches, no fun then. But nonetheless, things do seem to be requiring our attention.
To start at the beginning of my view of things. I don't think we have any solid evidence that consciousness is anything other than a localized anomaly here on earth. Since we have got it, we probably exaggerate its importance in terms of the universe. But the closer we look at far away big stuff or up close little stuff, the less organized it gets. There are of course patterns in the universe, but whether there is an overriding consciousness in charge of their arrangement is another matter. Suit yourself, don't mean to start a fuss about that.
If I were to give a name to my thing, I would call it a theory about the evolution of organizational structure. Many of my ideas developed from readings on chaos theory and some on statistical theory and some on anthropological theories and some were delivered by mystical gofers from the dream world. Though some may yell "stop thief" as I appropriate their terminology for my metaphorical purposes, I can do little else because I am neither scientist nor mathematician. [Of course what lies just beyond the current reach of any science discipline is also metaphorical, but that ain't got nothing to do with us here.]
Imagine ourselves in a totally dark cavern in a deep cave. Developing an artifact to enable us to see in such a place involves some very sophisticated science. Even so, the most elegant science cannot explain everything that occurs in the process. But if essentially everything is in working order, even the most simple of us can turn on a flashlight and immediately see in the dark. The final test of the science is whether light occurs and we can then see. If the science is wrong, the light won't come on. The point of that is that the final arbiter of the validity of scientific theory is whether or not it works here in the real world and whether we can know that it does. We have learned not to think about things like that, and to turn both the development and the evaluation of much of our lives over to the experts. As a result, the experts have developed a major case of arrogance. While those with outstanding expertise can be excused some degree of arrogance, that is true only when the arrogance results from competency. Unfortunately, many of the paths we now travel are the result of incompetent arrogance. We each have the right and the responsibility to take incompetent arrogance to task, which is basically what Pogo told us.
My first purloined concept is the normal distribution. [When I first wrote this paragraph some months ago, I should have called it the myth of the normal distribution. Upon further reflection, the normal distribution does serve a continuing purpose in statistics, but the normal distribution is not, nor can it be, a description of the real world. What it represents in terms of my ideas is that it is the way we perceive reality. We organize ourselves, as though the normal distribution reflects ourselves, so its reality comes from the way we use it. The percentage of Tom Thumbs is not matched by an equal percentage of Yao Mings. I may be forced to throw away yet another promising metaphor. Sigh.]Suppose we decide to count something, say the height of everyone in a given hundred mile circle. All the heights of the same measurement are transferred to a graph stacked one on top of the other. The stack with the most elements (people), the most common height, becomes the central stack, and distributed to the left and right of the center stack are stacks made up of folks either shorter or taller than the folks in the central stack. If we were part of this distribution, most of us would be crowded together toward the center, or the highest point in the bell shaped curve that depicts the normal distribution. I tend to think of the bell shaped curve in four dimensions, but I am not sure that is necessary or accurate. Moving away from the center in either direction, fewer and fewer folks would be part of the same stack. On one end standing alone, or almost so, would be Tom Thumb and on the other end would be Yao Ming. All we need to know for our purposes is that the density of whatever we are counting increases with proximity to the center of the bell shaped curve, and of course the density of whatever we are counting decreases as we move away from the center. The only other part of the normal distribution we need is to know is that the curve never actually touches the base line. The idea that someone shorter than Tom Thumb or taller than Yao Ming would come along and want to be included is not very likely, but it is possible.
Now let's deftly lift a term from chaos theory called fractal geometry. You may well be familiar with software that utilizes fractal geometry to create some fantastic self-similar forms. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, all we folks standing around under the bell may be unique in some respects, but we are all also basically quite similar, enough so that we could all be instantly recognized as people, even though the resulting picture might not be considered a good example of nonlinear art. An example frequently given is that if one takes a picture of a coastline, and then takes a series of pictures at higher and higher magnifications, the basic shape of the line separating the water from the land would be similar in each picture.
My personal favorite term in our bag of loot is the strange attractor. which is sort of a scientific term for "birds of a feather flock together". The strange part comes from whatever it is that makes them do that, and why they don't seem to be birds of a feather until they are flocked together, or why they sometimes get spooked for no apparent reason and fly off in every direction.
Finally there is the soliton. In our example, sometimes some weirdo comes charging through the almost end of the curve, and apparently stops where he or she damn well pleases, no matter how uncomfortable it makes the folks that are supposed to be there feel. Back in the sixties, if we had chaos theory terminology, we might have called the weirdo soliton a nonlinear streaker. We would be taught that the polite thing to do was simply to ignore such miscreants.
When we finish with our look at the cockpit doors, we may see our present dilemma more as a function of the natural evolution of the organizational structure we call civilization rather than some devious conspiracy by [Fill in the blank with your favorite devil, if you are a democrat you might pick Bush or greed, and if you are a republican you might pick Clinton or liberalism]. In either case you would be wrong; we didn't get here as the result of a conspiracy. Not that there are not cabals that attempt a conspiratorial takeover, just that they are not competent enough to pull it off. Chaos theory sees to that.
One other thing, my cyberspace glob seems to be in the process of forming a mini book. I promise to try and use good science and good sense in what I say, but at this point I am not up to developing points fully, or citing sources. As long as I am stealing stuff I might as well lift a term from the social sciences and call this a pilot book. Feel free to get up and wander around, the show can't really go on without your participation
Chapter 1
Existential Evasion [The link will appear here when I get it ready].
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