Paranoia and planes

The chance of being on a plane with a bomb is as likely as being hit by lightning – now repeat after me

By Andrew Button

Airport security has been a hot button issue in recent weeks. Al Qaeda took credit for the recent attempted bombing of a U.S. flight (dubbed the Christmas Bombing) and Germany’s Munich Airport closed two terminals after a laptop triggered a suspected bomb alarm and a flight to Louisiana was diverted to Philadelphia because of a phylactery (a small black box that orthodox Jews strap to their heads during prayer).

Air safety hysteria has reached a level not seen since the aftermath of September 11. India’s on high alert too, as they’ve been warned that there’s going to be a hijack attempt from a group linked to al-Qaeda on an Indian airliner.

In response to the foiled attack on the U.S., the British House of Commons passed a bill to introduce “explosion trace detection equipment” to its airports by the end of the year. Many other countries have also begun taking a close look at their security regulations in the wake of these incidents, more specifically the attempted Christmas bombing.

If you’ve been keeping track of this sort of things, you’ll know that these developments are nothing new. With every attack or attempted attack at an airport there comes a new set of security regulations, each more oppressive than the last.

If a personal item can be made to contain explosives, and if a would-be terrorist figures out how to package those explosives, it’s a safe bet that you’ll soon have yet another indispensable daily item you’re not allowed to carry on.

Mr. Abdulmutallab (responsible for the Christmas bombing) carried his explosives in his underwear. Maybe soon we’ll see the day when no boxer-briefs are allowed.

Airport security is as irrational as it is reactionary. The typical airport policy is to ban something whenever a new potential carrier of dangerous explosives is brought to their attention.

This is stupid for two reasons: It’s reactive and only deals with threats after they have been actualized and it increases people’s (sometimes pre-existing) fears about the danger of air travel.

The world is full of small, cramped spaces where dozens of strangers, some of whom may be carrying bombs, get together for hours at a time.

Have we forgotten the Underground Bombings that shook London to its core? Let us also not forget coffee shops, restaurants, and clubs – all of which have been targeted at some point, and all over the world by different terrorist groups.

Why is it that only airports obsessively screen for weapons? Is it because airplanes are especially prone to being used in terrorist attacks? Or is it because bombs on airplanes are especially likely to result in lots of fatalities?

Stupid security regulations make air travel so stressful it probably increases the chances that a traveller will use whatever is at hand as a weapon.

The last concern is a pretty valid one. As for the concerns over terrorist attacks and dangerous airplanes, those are completely unwarranted. If you look at the statistics for terrorist attacks over the past 20 years, you’ll see that most of them have taken place in embassies, army bases, and public streets.

The odds of an airplane being used as a weapon by terrorists is even lower than the odds of that same airplane falling out of the sky, which in turn is lower than the risk of a person being hit by lightning.

And as for airplanes being exceptionally dangerous places for people to carry weapons – how? Will a bomb on an airplane kill more people than a bomb in an office building? Just why didn’t we install bomb detectors in every building in North America in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing?

Airport security is so excessive because of the irrational fears people have. The simple fact is, people have an instinctive, gut level fear of airplanes, and this fear makes it especially profitable for TV news programs to devote ridiculous amounts of air time to stories of bombs on planes.

A story of a bomb on a bus isn’t as gripping as a story of a bomb on a plane, because in the case of a bus, we don’t have a pre-existing fear of the vehicle in question.

It goes like this: Man figures out how to get explosives onto plane, plane almost blows up, news stations blow story way out of proportion to the number of fatalities that occurred.

Then, people in suburbia panic over the thought of their son dying on the way to visit grandma in Florida, and airports make life shitty for sane people in order to appease insane people.

This is close to an epidemic. Maybe someday terrorists will start planting explosives in paranoid suburban households and put an end to all this.

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