Friday, January 08, 2010

Airline Safety

No, not the "you're doing it wrong" you expected -- though go read the whole article for that.

No fatal incidents have occurred since nearly simultaneous bombings of two Russian aircraft on 8/24/2004; this makes for the longest streak without a fatal incident since World War II. The overall death toll during the 2000s is about the same as it was during the 1960s, and substantially less than in the 1970s and 1980s, when violent incidents peaked. The worst individual years were 1985, 1988 and 1989, in that order; 2001 ranks fourth.

I hope to see the end of security theater in my lifetime, but I'm not optimistic in any shorter timeframe. There's currently a local wingbag-storm over some random guy who apparently walked through an unguarded station at Newark airport last weekend...with no sign of any terrorist acts or intents. The tune now, as in any sufficiently large bureaucracy, is that if we just get enough of the right procedures in place, nothing will ever happen again....

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