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Passenger Donna Bell's observation, "Had he opened the door, we'd all be dead," is totally without merit, as was the AP's contention, in the very first sentence, that passengers "had to take matters into their own hands to prevent Jose Manuel Pelayo-Ortega from bringing their plane down." The plane wasn't going anywhere -- except to Sacramento. Instead of seeking out expertise from somebody who actually knows something about airplanes, the reporter used a scary-sounding account from a frightened passenger who couldn't have been expected to understand what would or wouldn't happen.

As perhaps you've gathered, airplane doors can be a lot more complex than people might assume -- affixed with sensors, complicated latching systems and dozens of moving parts. On one 19-passenger turboprop I used to captain, the main cabin door had an inflatable seal around its inner sill. During flight, the seal would inflate, helping to lock in cabin pressure while blocking out the racket from the plane's two extremely loud engines. Every now and then, the seal would suffer a leak or puncture and begin to deflate, sometimes quite rapidly. The resultant loss of pressurization was easily addressed and ultimately harmless, but the sudden noise -- a great, 100-decibel sucking sound backed by the now unbuffered throb of two 1,100-horsepower engines only inches away -- would scare the living daylights out of everybody on the plane, including me.

As for the United Airlines incident, you may take further comfort in knowing that a pair of F-16s were scrambled from Colorado's Buckley Air Force Base to intercept the A320, just in case.

There is, or there used to be, a big difference between so-called air rage and attempted acts of air piracy or terrorism. Thanks to our perpetual Sept. 11 hangover, that distinction is now usually made afterward. Last December, federal air marshals shot and killed an unarmed man at Miami International Airport. These days, even a minor in-flight disruption is liable to result in a pair of supersonic fighters hanging outside your window. Speaking in the above AP story, a NORAD spokesman cites an astonishing 2,300 military intercepts of civilian airliners since the 2001 attacks. That's more than one every day. The government won't verify an exact number, but even a fraction of that total would be unnerving.

During an intercept, military pilots follow a careful, step-by-step protocol to avoid accidental shoot-downs, but still there's the risk of a tragic mistake -- to say nothing of the vast amounts of fuel and labor these missions entail. All for the sake of posturing, if you ask me. With the threat of a copycat Sept. 11-style takeover all but off the table, what these sorties are intended to accomplish seems ambiguous at best. Put it this way: The likelihood of errantly shooting down an airliner is probably the same as or greater than the chance of successfully intercepting a commandeered aircraft headed for a skyscraper or U.S. landmark.

Some notorious military shoot-downs of civilian aircraft:

2001: As a U.S. surveillance plane watches, a Peruvian fighter shoots down a planeload of suspected drug smugglers. The aircraft is actually ferrying missionaries.

1988: Distracted by an ongoing gun battle, the crew of the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes mistakes an Iran Air flight for a hostile military aircraft and destroys it with two surface-to-air missiles. All 290 occupants of the Airbus A300 are killed.

1983: Korean Air Lines flight 007, a Boeing 747 carrying 269 passengers and crew from New York to Seoul, is downed by a Soviet fighter after drifting off course near Sakhalin Island in the North Pacific.

1980: In a tragedy shrouded in controversy and coverup, an Itavia Airlines (Italy) DC-9 carrying 81 people crashes into the Mediterranean after being hit by fire from a Libyan MiG-23, according to one theory. It is later alleged that American fighter jets engaged in a NATO exercise provoked the Libyan pilots into firing their rockets, which struck the nearby jetliner.

1973: An off-course Libyan Arab Airlines flight bound for Cairo is fired on by two Israeli F-4 Phantoms over the Sinai. All but five of 113 occupants are killed when the damaged 727 attempts a belly landing in the desert.

GO-AROUNDS

Re: Security and surveillance

Just a slight quibble with your line, "The average London commuter is covertly videotaped anywhere from 10 to 300 times daily." It's not covertly; it's overtly. British society works on the principle that policing is by consent of the public (that's why so few British cops carry guns), and the British public is in the large part quite happy about the cameras, which are placed right where you can see them. If a policeman monitoring a video screen can call his colleagues to a crime scene faster than with a phone call, all well and good. The cameras everyone hates, on the other hand, are the ones that get you a speeding ticket.

-- George Brims (62 in a 50 zone)

One question that I often ponder when traveling: Why do first-class and business-class passengers sometimes have the option of shorter security lines than coach passengers? Isn't the potential threat they pose the same as it is for every other passenger (and perhaps greater -- a trip to martyrdom is always better in first than economy)? I always thought that first-class passengers were entitled to better service, better food and priority boarding, but those are airline perks. Does TSA work for the airlines, or for the public?

-- Andrea Pertosa

Author's note: Not all airports have designated security lines for premium-class passengers. Unless I'm not paying enough attention, they seem to be the exception. (For what it's worth, Mohammed Atta and his four henchmen all were seated in first or business class on American Airlines flight 11, as were most of the Sept. 11 cabal on the other three flights.)

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