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New security restrictions, added screening devices and detectors and an investigation into the security gaps which led to the Christmas day terrorist attack are all in the works. And understandably, passengers will begrudgingly accept the new measures, at least for the short term.
Travelers on incoming international flights said that during the final hour, attendants removed blankets, banned opening overhead bins, and told passengers to stay in their seats with their hands in plain sight.
So what do the actual numbers say? Nate Silver takes a look.
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.
[...]
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.
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.
I wonder how many will find the numbers comforting.
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There is no such thing as “security.” Anyone can do whatever they want to blow up a plane. It is just to give the world an added false sense of security.
The conservatives will not find the numbers comforting they will find fault in the addition of said numbers.
and @ME is correct, there is no such thing as security ….or privacy for that matter.