India, Oct. 18 -- Israel profiles every arrival. It still did not stop a first officer who, by his own reported account, had already flown the route once to hijack it. The rest of us have less.

Imagine the door stays shut.

Capt. Smit Machchhar is on the floor of a flydubai Boeing 737, bleeding from the crash axe his first officer has just swung into the back of his head. The jet is already falling-more than fourteen thousand feet in under thirty seconds, rudder skin tearing off in the dive. He does not reach the handle. The cockpit door, reinforced after September 11 so that no passenger could ever force it, does exactly what it was built to do. It holds.

Thirty seconds later there is a hole in the Saudi desert, or worse, a hole on the...