The odds that any one airplane will be hijacked are next to zero, but terrorist attacks seem more preventable than car accident deaths because of the ‘one-shot deal’ nature of the attacks. It should be much easier to prevent 150 passenger deaths than 150 fatal car accidents, so it makes sense to take reasonable steps to protect those passengers.
That said, obviously, most of the security stuff we do is a waste. Random bag screening is ridiculous and I have no confidence in the TSA bag handlers, and the most sensible step of total screening isn’t being taken.
I think we are getting the usual complacency from people who think that the chances of themselves or their loved ones getting killed ,wounded or permamently maimed by terrorists are minimal to non existant.
For Americans its a case of not IF terrorists will strike but when and how hard and how often.
In the U.K. we suffered a prolonged terrorist campaign over several decades where the terrorists considered women ,children and old age pensioners performing such actions as shopping and sitting in the park as legitimate targets to murder and maim.
The terrorists were white and enjoyed the tacit approval of many Americans who in their ignorance naivly considered them to be freedom fighters and not murdering scum .
As a result in the U.K. while we dont enjoy the constraints put upon us by the threat of terrorist action we endure them without moaning about them too much .
I recommend to Americans and Australians that you do the same as I think the next time you get hit by terrorists it will probably be worse then before .
I hope and pray that i’m wrong .
A Boeing 777 costs $178 to $264 million. A 747 currently costs $230 million. Even a midsize zircraft costs $130-180 million.
Plus you have the cost of lawsuits becasue security wasn’t adequate
Add to that the loss of business as people stop flying because they are afraid of being hijacked.
It’s not just about hijacking either. I’m sure there are plenty of morons who would unknowingly bring something dangerous on a plane and inadvertantly cause a crash - weapons, chemicals, SNAKES
We spend money on fire departments but the chances of my house burning down is relatively small.
How can it possibly be worse than the money, effort, and lives we’ve wasted so far trying to prevent it? Are the terrorists going to launch several ICBMs or something?
I’ll concede the airport security thing for now, because I don’t know enough about it. It seems out of whack to me, and if it was such a cost saver, you’d think that the airlines would be instituting these policies themselves instead of having them foisted on them by the government. But I’m kind of ignorant in this regard.
Fire departments SAVE money. If we were paying millions of dollars for each house saved, you’d agree that would be too much, right?
Prevent it, not go through useless motions that at best are just for show, and at worst are eliminating our freedom and privacy by increments. Going after the terrorists is more likely to work than security measures that they will easily evade. And they will easily evade any security measures short of totalitarianism.
You lock the goddamned door to the cockpit. You armor that door. You screen all baggage. You make certain that the pilots know that no matter what happens in the cabin they are not to communicate with hijackers or deviate from what ground control tells them to do.
Now a hijack is impossible in any case short of the pilot co-pilot being in league with the hijackers.
I wonder what all those who live their days in fear of terrorism will happily accept when the first American airliner is brought down by a Stinger - raze all land within 5 miles of any airport?
I’ve traveled on Amtrak far more than I’ve flown, and let me tell ya: There is zero security for train trips, as far as I’ve seen. Show your ticket, hop on, stow your luggage wherever. Hell, I once got on in L.A. about 3 years ago and they didn’t even ask for tickets until we got to Fullerton (half an hour later).
But I have to admit: it sure beats the hassles of flying.
When flying out of LAX or O’Hare, it’s not unusual to wait well over an hour. (I usually spend this wasted time thinking of all the ways I could readily defeat their systems, and I usually come up with three or four novel, workable ways every time.) I’ve actually been in line for over three hours at LAX, and the entire flight had to be delayed, no doubt resulting in cascading delays for successive flights. This isn’t a minor inconvenience; this is real cost, and when you sum up the figures it turns into billions of lost dollars every year, and financial reprecussions that filter down into other sectors.
Of course, losing a plane to a terrorist attack is also going to have significant reprecussions, financial and otherwise. However, you’ll note that the number of actual, successful terrorist attacks relative to the total number of flights is almost negligable, even prior to the September 11 attacks. The Taliban-backed terrorists who siezed those planes were grasping what we call “low hanging fruit”; i.e. it was an opportunity that barely skilled, moderately financed, highly motivated fanatics could act upon. The simple modification of cabin doors that secure from the cockpit (and keeping the doors closed by default) would have entirely prevented those attacks at minimal cost, and I regarded it–even long before the attacks–a stupid lapse of security that ready access to the flight deck was so easy for passengers. Airlines in other countries have long ago implemented procedures to prevent this kind of hijacking, and the fact that American carriers did not and were not required to do so is a gross miscalculation of judgement; fortunately, one that was easily rectified.
You’ll note that despite repeated appeals to eternal watchfulness “'cause the terrorists will most certainly try to strike again” and vague implications of terrorist actions forestalled by shadowy government agencies (which seem to me most likely rejected story ideas from 24) that there have been only a handful of small and mostly ineffectual attacks since then; even ones that did serious amounts of injury or destruction (Bali bombing, London Underground) were rare and apparently difficult for the terrorist organizations to repeat; nor were they really preventable by any security plans, extant or proposed.
And I live in the L.A. area, which is the third or fourth most likely target for a hypothetical large-scale terrorist attack. (According to the t.v., it’s actually the first, but that’s just because Kiefer Sutherland doesn’t want to commute to New York.) There’s basically nothing I can do to change that, short of moving. If The Terrorists [cue ominous theme music] decide to detonate a dirty bomb, poison the water system, or demolish the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center on Sunset Blvd., I’m just hosed. (Actually, if they blow up the Celebrity Center they might actually accrue some heartfelt good sentiment by the public at large, though they’d have to face the combined wrath of Tom Cruise and John Travolta, which is probably more than they’re prepared to take on.) Life is risk, and pretending that snooping through diaper bags and making people drop trousers in the middle of an airport is making anyone genuinely safer is a nonsense ploy primarily designed to condition people to maintaining a constant low level sense of anxiety and unquestionably accepting authority.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you have no idea of what you speak of, here. A gunfight on a fully loaded, pressurized aircraft would be a bad day for everyone involved. Anyone who carries a concealed firearm in public is already carrying a great burden of responsibility; using one in those conditions without being more of a hazard to bystanders then the primary targets requires specialized training and ammunition. In short, this is a bad idea.
I was in Tampa (or was it Orlando? I guess I’m not one of those once-a-year flyers that someone was bitching about) and after going through their VERY long line I’m sitting at the gate waiting for my flight when they come on the PA and announce that EVERYONE gets to leave the terminal and get re-screened.
Why?
Because one of the metal detectors had been unplugged for an unknown time.
I wonder how many people boarded planes during that time and subsequently took off?
What are these supposedly useless motions? The last time I checked, the process consists of the following:
-present your boarding pass and photo ID
-put your shoes, laptop, coat and carry-on on the conveyer
-liquids should be in 3 oz containers in a transparent bag (ok, I’ll concede that’s stupid)
-walk through the detector(s)
-submit to a wand swipe if you forget and still have your keys in your pocket
-collect your things and be on your way
So what’s the big fucking deal? Which of these measures should they discontinue (other than the stupid liquid thing which I really don’t think they check anymore)?
If you say so. I’ve never experience an hour delay at O’Hare and I can’t remember the last time I was in LA. But I do fly out of Newark, LaGuardia and JFK regularly and I still don’t see the hours long delays you’re talking about.
That would be a waste of time. You can’t hijack a train for obvious reasons. If you just wanted to blow one up, you could just as easily set an explosive on the tracks. And once again, the difference between the plane and the train is that the train can always stop and get help. An aircraft is also a lot more delicate than a locomotive.
Once you’re on the plane, you’re stuck with whatevers and whoever is in there until you land. It may just be psychological, but people feel beter about flying knowing that some measure of precaution was taken with everything coming on board.
They definitely check the liquids, and if the TSA rep is having a bad day they’ll argue the point with you even if the size of the container is clearly marked as being 3 oz. or less, just as a power play.
“The big fucking deal”, as you put it, is that this does very little in terms of actually enhancing security. Aside from the metal detector/screening, this accomplishes nothing. Any nonmetal item I could conceivably hide in my shoes I could conceal somewhere else and walk through the detector. And adding more and elaborate security procedures means that there will be more failures to follow those procedures.
LAX seems to be one of the worst; the Denver airport is just as big but security there always seems to move quickly (even though the airport is very poorly laid out for this). I’ll concede that this is probably more about local training and support; nonetheless, there are real and quantifiable effects that do make a significant economic impact, and while it’s tempting to say that it’s worth it if it saves “even one life”, the fact is that we don’t apply this rationale to other aspects of daily life.
Clearly you haven’t seen Steven Seagal’s cinematic masterpiece Under Siege 2.
According to Wiki there are were about 250 million autos in the US. Most US states require liability insurance and as a WAG half of the cars have collision insurance. According to this site the the average annual premium for auto insurance is about $850. If we assume the split between liability and collision insurance is $300 and $550, that 90% have liability and 50% have collsion the total annual US insurance bill is $133 billion dollars. If you want to compare direct costs of terrorism to those of automobile accidents, leaving out the self-inflicted costs of everreactive security response, the 9/11 costs in money and lives isn’t even in the running.
Yes a single terrorist attack is destructive and costly, but to equal the destruction and cost of auto accidents we would have to have a 9/11’s every month to equal the deaths. I don’t know what the direct costs of 9/11 were but if you add up auto insurance, the cost of repairs and the like I expect we would need several 9/11’s every year to rise to the auto accident costs.
Come now. The analogy didn’t address the methods involved but rather the degree of overreaction.
-put your shoes, laptop, coat and carry-on on the conveyer*
Taking shoes off = stupid. Ridiculous. Inane. Wave your f&*^%wand over my feet if you’re so damn worried.
-liquids should be in 3 oz containers in a transparent bag
Similarly stupid. Incredibly so.
The idea that we should put bomb dogs on every bus from Toledo to Mesa Arizona, at the cost of cutting all real services, is so paranoid it’s unbelievable.
The politics of fear is the politics of national poverty.
Just about all of them. You could totally eliminate air travel and it wouldn’t put a dent in terrorism because they’d just switch targets; bombs in shopping malls for example. Oh, it makes sense to put in a few basic precautions like locked cabin doors to weed out the random crazies and incompetents, but anything more is, at best, going to just make them shift targets. It costs money, eats away at our freedom, privacy and dignity, and costs time. And if they really want to they’ll get through any plausible security. Not that they will bother; we hurt ourselves with this security paranoia, so they’ve already scored a victory.
You may feel better, I don’t. I’ve heard too much about people being harassed and humiliated for having the wrong name or being in the ACLU. It doesn’t make me feel better; it’s simply convinced me that I don’t want to fly unless I have no other options. I’m not into self abuse.
If airplane hijackings was as common here as the truck bombings are in Iraq, then I’d support the status quo. But right now, the security measures seem drawn out, tedious and really don’t make us safe. It’s a pity, too. We will never regain the freedom to travel as we did before September 11th. I’m sure in 2030 we all will look at that scene in Home Alone where the family is running through the airport with a wistful sigh. By then, I suspect, getting on an airplane will require passengers to go through the equilavent of a maximum security prison to get to the flight terminal.
It astounds me how eagerly and willingly we Americans gave up our civil liberties after September 11th. Life is truly stranger than fiction.
