Thank you for proving my point about overreactions. Did it occur to you that people, passengers and crew alike, including some flight attendants carried small pocket knives for many years prior to 9/11? In that time, how many instances were there of passengers going nuts and engaging in slashing attacks out of hundreds of thousands of flights since the dawn of the airline industry. Please give specific examples if you can find any. As a flight attendant, your presence is not what is going to get the aircraft down safely. A flight attendant being injured or killed is unfortunate, but no more so than any other employee of any other company, and therefore should have no more "special" protections than the people who work in public jobs without any kind of security screening whatsoever. That obviously isn't the case with pilots since if they are injured or killed at the controls, it puts the entire aircraft at risk, hence the reason the reinforced door isn't going away anytime soon.