The problem wasn't the knife regulation. We should allow such tiny knives on planes. They're harmless. You can go to a fancy restaurant in the airport and get served steak with a steak knife. You can bring an object with a glass piece in it, smash the glass once you're passed security, and have a small bladed weapon that way. You can bring in dull metal and file into a sharp edge on the tile of the floor of the family bathroom prison shive style. It's trivially easy to get such a small bladed weapon inside the security cordon. Hell, some people have finger nails that are more dangerous than those knives.

The real impactful change after 9/11 was reinforcing the cockpit doors, and putting in regulations requiring them to remain closed and locked during flight. That was the real impactful change. The TSA's just security theater.

Both you and your grandpa were right. But you both missed the real solution.

I accidentally brought handcuffs into a flight on August 2001. The TSA agent who found them asked what I planned to do with them.

Being a teenager, the answer was obviously that I kept them in my jacket to pull them out and show my high-school friends how quirky and cool I was. But being a teenager, I didn’t realize how endearing that response would be, so I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, which was somehow better and worse.

“I’m visiting my girlfriend!”

She gave me a slow blink and said “Well, alright then, go get your freak on!” (Or something of a similar sentiment - time has robbed me of the exact phasing.)

Airport security pre-9/11 was pretty horrendous. Hijackings were surprisingly common compared to today, but the difference was that it was usually for a ransom and/or demanding that the plane go somewhere else. This led to a general policy of just going along with hijackers and letting the authorities deal with it later. The most famous example of this kind of scenario is D. B. Cooper.

An important thing to remember about Aviation in general is that every lesson is written in blood. This leads me to PSA 1771. In 1987 a disgruntled former airline employee got on plane, shot his boss and the flight crew, then intentionally crashed the plane killing everyone else. This incident was entirely caused by the poor security practices at the time. The perpetrator's employee ID hadn't been taken back when he was fired and because he had those credentials he was able to get on the plane without being searched.

Pre-9/11 security in American airports was wild to me. There had been a load of plane hijackings in Europe before my time so it was always fairly locked down but I distinctly remember San Diego airport you could basically walk in off the street and nearly be at the plane when people were disembarking in the late 90s.