You may have heard in the past week another attempt of terrorist's plot to blow up a commercial airliner using liquid explosive was foiled in the US.

Bruce Schneier had written an opinion piece on aviation security measures etc., good read as per usual.

Last week's attempted terror attack on an airplane heading from Amsterdam to Detroit has given rise to a bunch of familiar questions.

How did the explosives get past security screening? What steps could be taken to avert similar attacks? Why wasn't there an air marshal on the flight? And, predictably, government officials have rushed to institute new safety measures to close holes in the system exposed by the incident.

Reviewing what happened is important, but a lot of the discussion is off-base, a reflection of the fundamentally wrong conception most people have of terrorism and how to combat it.

Terrorism is rare, far rarer than many people think. It's rare because very few people want to commit acts of terrorism, and executing a terrorist plot is much harder than television makes it appear.

The best defenses against terrorism are largely invisible: investigation, intelligence, and emergency response. But even these are less effective at keeping us safe than our social and political policies, both at home and abroad. However, our elected leaders don't think this way: They are far more likely to implement security theater against movie-plot threats.

Is aviation security mostly for show?

Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner asks:

There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?

Let's expand Joyner's scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Again, no editorializing (for now). These are just the numbers.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html

Good one Billy :D

Good article

Yeah good one Billy.

I like it when things are brought down to the bare facts. As it is hard to argue against mathematics and statistics.

I don't understand how odds can be used to represent the chances of being involved in an airplane related attack. I mean certainly your locality, what airline you're using, what time of year it is and a million other variables will have some influence on those odds and will affect them.

It's an extremely rough estimate and not really accurate representation of terrorist acts. Still, even if you include all those variables, the odds are extremely low and you have a better chance of dying from being shat on by Kim Kardashian.

Well the odds of winning the lottery are higher (or is it lower? heh) and that happens every week :P

Why the US Government hasn't hired Bruce Schneier to head up Homeland Security is beyond me. The man has common sense pouring out every orifice, and you get the feeling that the numerous security agencies would have produced far more efficient and effective results.

There's a big difference between the good work the security services do day in day out and the ones they have to do for political feel-good reasons.

On average one significant extremist plot is dismantled every week by western security forces. As far back as early 2007 MI5 was disrupting a significant terrorist plot every 6 weeks in the UK alone. In November 2006 they revealed they were actively tracking 1600 extremists in 200 networks (original link, i think it's dead but i can forward it to anyone that's interested.) and I've read somewhere it's now much higher (but couldn't find the article).

They may have to run the charade that is airport security for all of us to endure, but I think the description of the attempts on aircraft as "clownishly inept" is extremely dishonest. If the 19 men with their box cutters had failed on 9/11, would that have been described as "clownishly inept" too?

There's nothing clownishly inept about taking out a plane with explosives. It's just much more difficult now for four guys hell bent on killing infidels to get on the same flight with weapons, so it's left to individuals to carry out these acts.

In the past a guy with explosives in his crotch or shoe would declare his position and take control of the plane. Now he's got to ignite it as quickly as possible before the passengers beat the s*** out of him.

I like it when things are brought down to the bare facts. As it is hard to argue against mathematics and statistics.

What is the argument? That the threat of terrorism is exagerated or that the TSA/HS/FBI are doing a really good job between them of stopping attacks?

Seems to me that its the later.

Could be both.

What is the argument? That the threat of terrorism is exagerated or that the TSA/HS/FBI are doing a really good job between them of stopping attacks?

I'm going to say the second when you consider

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

from NY Times piece

Why worry about terrorist attack, just fly with Garuda or Southern China Airlines and you've just put your lives at higher risk than any other reason.

i think bruce ignores that security theatre might be important. if people need to feel safe then maybe security theatre might be the most effective way of making people feel safe. more people died from choosing to drive than to fly post 9/11 than in the 9/11 attacks themselves. security theatre can save lives just not in the way that you think. sucks that governments go for theatre which is expensive before trying to convince us with statistics/propaganda which are cheap :(

f people need to feel safe then maybe security theatre might be the most effective way of making people feel safe. more people died from choosing to drive than to fly post 9/11 than in the 9/11 attacks themselves.

gonna need a source for that hast.

No he doesn't?

greazy obv everyone knows flying safer than driving

flying might be safer but i guess it isn't very obvious that enough people chosen to drive that 2973 extra people were killed. my source is Dance with Chance. in 2001-2004 128,525 people died in car accidents in the US and statisticians have found that this was 5% higher than expected or around 5000 extra deaths (numbers don't add up for some reason :)). i have found other references as well:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/4014922
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=677549

which put the extra road deaths at around 250/month

last edited by hast at 16:23:52 31/Dec/09