Flydubai passengers cower and scream as plane plunges 18K feet in

The image from that Flydubai flight is enough to make anyone's stomach drop: 18,000 feet lost in seconds, passengers screaming, children crying, all because a pilot was fighting for his life in the cockpit. You don't need to be an aviation expert to understand how close that plane came to becoming a smoking hole in the ground. That should scare every person who has ever buckled into a seat on a commercial flight.

The specifics here matter. This wasn't turbulence or a mechanical fault. A person got into a position to stab a pilot mid-flight, and the immediate reaction was to put the entire aircraft into a terrifying descent just to give the crew a fighting chance. That tells you everything about how fragile the whole system is when someone gets through. The hardened cockpit door exists for a reason. If a threat reaches the controls, all those years of "security theater" at the terminal don't mean a thing.

This is a moment for airlines and regulators to answer some very uncomfortable questions. How did that individual get on board? What was the vetting process? And why is it that a pilot's last line of defense—when he's strapped into his seat—amounts to hoping a passenger with a weapon doesn't get lucky? We owe the traveling public more than a prayer and a steep dive.

A plane that drops 18,000 feet is a near-miss in the most literal sense. We should treat it like one, not shuffle it off as an isolated incident. Safety is the product airlines are selling. When that fails, everything else is just advertising.