10 Jun How much has our world changed since 9/11?

In a recent episode of the Freakonomics Podcast, Patrick Smith, the airline pilot who hosts the Ask a Pilot website, told a wonderful story about his fascination with airplanes and flight as a Boston pre-teen:

One of the things my friends and I used to do during junior high school was we would take the subway out to Logan Airport in Boston—back in those days, of course, you could just walk through security without a ticket—and we would stake out the jet way when a flight came in.

And after all the passengers were off, we would walk down the jet way and approach one of the pilots or flight attendants and say, “Hey is it OK if we come in and look at the cockpit?”

And almost always the answer was, “Sure! Come on!” And we would go up to the cockpit and sit in the pilot’s chairs and pretend we were up in the air over the ocean somewhere. That was a pretty big thrill for a seventh grader, eighth grader.

I remember one time we spent an hour in the cockpit of a Northwest Airlines DC 10 at Logan Airport, and absolutely nobody knew we were there. Finally a mechanic came along.

“What the hell are you kids doing?”

“Oh, we just came on and wanted to take some pictures and look around.”

“All right, well, just don’t touch anything. Don’t mess with anything.”

And left us there! Imagine that today.

To anyone born after, say, 1990, this story must seem preposterous, since similar hijinks would be utterly unimaginable today. But to anyone my age, it’s completely plausible, because we grew up in an age when adventuresome curiosity was commonplace.

One summer vacation, a high school friend crossed the US hopping freights, returning to school in the fall with dreamy accounts of the hobo code.

Late one night in the 1960s, some teen friends and I snuck onto an airfield at Chatham, Massachusetts, for a close-up look at a Goodyear Blimp temporarily moored there. A security guard soon appeared, but instead of putting the run on us, he patiently answered our questions about its workings.

Thanks to the helium on board, he explained, the craft only weighed a few hundred pounds.

“Try lifting it,” he said.

One by one, we positioned ourselves under the blimp and, backs pressed against the passenger compartment, lifted the 192-foot aircraft a few inches into the air.

This probably comes off as a typical old man’s rant about the good old days. I don’t mean it that way. It’s just a stark illustration to the barriers we have erected—some sensible, others foolish—in the name of risk management.