Barriers to Barriers

Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. They affected me deeply, and as I wrote about in “Falling in Love,”, they unlocked the realization that I wanted to propose to Christine.

After the attacks, the U.S. government responded with remarkable speed to pass the Aviation and Transportation Security Act a little over two months later on November 19, 2001.

One of the items included in the new law was a requirement to fortify airplane flight deck doors and locks against intrusion attempts from the passenger compartment. On the surface, this makes sense as a countermeasure against hijacking attempts.

The law instructed the FAA to issue the rule as soon as possible without the usual notice and comment period, and they did this a little under two months later, on January 15, 2002.

By April 9, 2003, the entire U.S. airline fleet was required to be retrofitted with fortified doors and locks that could not be forced open from the cabin.

But there was one problem.

While no one would argue that there wasn’t value in fortifying the doors, breaking through the flight deck door was never part of the 9/11 hijackers’ plan.

According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Mohamed Atta, the plot’s lead hijacker, did not consider breaking down the flight deck doors a viable idea. He didn’t think it would be necessary, as he was confident the doors would be opened during the flight. The plot’s architect, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had told the earliest trainees the same thing years before: watch for flight crew visits to the lavatory and flight attendants’ visits to the flight deck for food service.

This is why, even with fortified doors, you may notice flight attendants forced into the role of human shield with the aid of a beverage cart.

An understanding of this risk led a couple of airlines, United and Northwest (which later merged with Delta), to voluntarily install secondary barriers — temporary gates that could be deployed when the flight deck door was to be opened — in the early-to-mid 2000s.

The FAA also began studying this gap, but declined to add a secondary barrier requirement in 2007. They did ask RTCA, the industry-driven standards organization I wrote about in “Guardians of the Henhouse,” to write a standard for secondary barriers in 2008, which was completed in the form of DO-329 in September 2011 — a decade after the 9/11 attacks. The FAA then turned this into Advisory Circular 120-110 in April 2015.

Happy ending — the system worked — right?

Well, not exactly.

In Advisory Circular 120-110, the FAA made secondary barriers voluntary. You still might think that would be enough for the airlines to proactively install this common sense safety measure to keep their crew members and passengers safe.

They did not.

In fact, a Department of Transportation Inspector General investigation a couple years later, in 2017, found that exactly zero of the 34 FAA inspectors and only 5 of the 63 airline representatives the auditors interviewed had even heard of the guidance.

No mandate, no action.

And in what might be a familiar story at this point, it wasn’t the FAA that was going to demand a mandate. That task would fall to a grieving family member.

Ellen Saracini lost her husband Victor in the 9/11 attacks. Victor was piloting United Flight 175, which was hijacked following its departure from Boston and flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

By the early 2010s, Ellen saw that voluntary equipage wasn’t just going nowhere. It was going backwards.

While Victor’s employer, United Airlines, had initially taken proactive steps to install secondary barriers, they later reversed course and began removing them. They even went so far as to pay Boeing extra to remove secondary barriers on new aircraft orders.

Through her advocacy, Ellen was able to build bipartisan House support for secondary barriers, leading to the introduction of the Saracini Aviation Safety Act of 2013. It called for the entire U.S. fleet of major and regional passenger airlines to be retrofitted with secondary barriers.

But like I described in “The ADS-B In Resistance Playbook,”, stopping something in D.C. requires far less political force than passing something. And the same lobbying machinery was already firing on all cylinders.

The first step a House bill must take is to be considered by the committee of jurisdiction, in this case the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee. Then-committee chairman Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) had the ultimate say in the committee’s priorities. Even with broad, bipartisan support, all it takes is one person in the right position to put the brakes on.

And that’s what Chairman Shuster did.

While only Chairman Shuster knows why he did not prioritize the Saracini Aviation Safety Act of 2013, it’s worth noting that during this period of delay, the Airlines for America (A4A) political action committee gave the maximum allowable contribution to Chairman Shuster’s campaign.

Meanwhile, according to an April 2015 Politico article:

Shuster and Shelley Rubino, vice president for global government affairs for Airlines for America, have been romantically involved since last summer, according to multiple sources familiar with their relationship. Rubino, a former top House Democratic leadership aide, has been with the trade group since March 2012.

The two are often seen together at fundraisers and D.C. events, where Shuster is a sought-after figure. They also have been spotted together in Washington when Congress is not in session.

Yeah.

According to Associated Press reporting at the time, Shuster also hired Chris Brown, A4A’s vice president for legislative and regulatory policy, to be staff director on the subcommittee that was writing the next FAA reauthorization bill.

The foxes weren’t just guarding the henhouse. They were in the henhouse.

In April 2016, the Senate passed an FAA reauthorization bill, 95–3, that included a narrower version of the mandate: new aircraft only. But when the House and Senate settled for a short-term extension that July, the secondary barrier language was gone from the final text.

A little over two years later, the following text was included when the 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act became law on October 5, 2018:

Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration shall issue an order requiring installation of a secondary cockpit barrier on each new aircraft that is manufactured for delivery to a passenger air carrier in the United States operating under the provisions of part 121 of title 14, Code of Federal Regulations.

It took a while, but the system eventually worked, right?

Well, not exactly.

This language still only applied to new aircraft, so barriers would trickle in over decades as aircraft are decommissioned and replaced. There is also the minor detail that even for new aircraft, the FAA did not actually fulfill the requirement that Congress wrote into law.

The October 5, 2019 deadline Congress set came and went. So did October 5, 2020. Finally, as the three-year anniversary of the deadline approached, the FAA issued a notice of proposed rulemaking for secondary barriers on August 1, 2022.

But that still isn’t an order, which is what the law required. It’s the starting gun for the same type of lobbying feeding frenzy that I described in “I Think I Can’t.”

So, that’s what we got next.

But the process did lead to the FAA issuing a rule on June 26, 2023, effective 60 days later, which would require new aircraft manufactured two years after the effective date to be equipped with secondary barriers.

OK, August 25, 2025.

The airline lobbyists made installing what 9/11 widow Ellen Saracini aptly described as “a big-person baby-gate” sound as complicated as landing a 737 on Mars, successfully stripped the requirement down to new aircraft only, and prevented anything at all from being required until two weeks short of 24 years after the 9/11 attacks.

Time for the airlines to take the win and get cracking, right?

Well, not exactly.

On May 5, 2025 — 112 days before the deadline — A4A petitioned the FAA for a two-year extension (Play 2: Never miss an opportunity to buy time.). They claimed — cue the violins — that operators “now face compliance impossibility, at worst, or extreme hardship, at best.” The Regional Airline Association (RAA) sent their own extension request on June 11, 2025.

The FAA met airline lobbyists halfway and granted an extension for one year, to July 31, 2026.

So, as of August 1, 2026 — that’s right, last month — all Part 121 passenger aircraft manufactured after August 25, 2025 must be equipped with a secondary barrier.

Well, not exactly.

Regional airline Horizon Air secured a carveout for its Embraer E175s until July 31, 2027 and Breeze Airways has a carveout for its Airbus A220s until March 31, 2027.

But we’re close!

As we mark a quarter of a century since the 9/11 attacks tomorrow, family members of victims, airline pilots, and flight attendants continue to advocate for retrofitting the roughly 5,900 passenger aircraft in use that were manufactured before August 25, 2025 with secondary barriers.

And airline lobbyists are still running the same playbook to prevent that from happening.