I remember those days. It seemed some months that if you were flying to or from Miami, you had about one chance in ten of an unscheduled stop in Havana.
But in the 70âs, passengers were carefully instructed to comply fully and cooperate completely with the hijacker. Flight crew also.
All of that changed with 9/11.
Reinforced cockpit doors and vigilant passengers mean that nothing like 9/11 will ever happen again. Someone with an explosive device might be able to bring an airliner down, but theyâll never again be able to fly one into a building.
We could go back to 70âs era security and it still wouldnât happen. If someone managed to get a submachine gun aboard a flight, they would still be gang tackled by every able-bodied person on the flight.
While the deaths of the passengers involved in the mobbing of the would be terrorist would definitely count as airline-terrorism deaths, the number would still be orders of magnitude smaller than from flying a plane into a skyscraper.
Back to the level of say, drownings in bathtubs 
Going on 13 years after the fact, the TSA is still trying to stop the kind of attacks that happened 9 Sep 11, despite the fact those things will never happen again.
This is probably true, but at the same time itâs true that we could see major airline crashes/explosions under a pre-9/11 security regime.
And I understand that some people would say that this is an acceptable risk, and that even with these risks airline travel would still be statistically very safe. But itâs difficult to reconcile these claimed attitudes with all of the angst and outrage weâre seeing over the shooting down of a Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine. All of a sudden weâre not so blase about security or the risks involved in flying, and weâre engaging in the same hindsight bias that led the powers that be to believe that 9/11 could have been avoided if we had just connected the dots (or had more dots, or had the resources to connect them) or had better security or whatever.
You just conflated the notion of a passenger bringing enough explosives on board a flight to bring the plane down with the notion of a ground based air defense system being used to shoot down an airliner.
Maybe you can help me by explaining how TSA style screening could possibly prevent an aircraft being shot down by a missile system designed for actual warfare.
Iâm not saying it could, nor did I ever say this: itâs you who is doing the conflating. What I did say was that anti-security people say that airline travel would remain statistically safe even if there were lots more terrorism incidents. But in response to the Ukraine incident (and the earlier Malaysian Airlines incident), suddenly the risk of these extremely rare occurrences becomes so great as to have rendered the lack of precautions and foresight unforgivable⌠even though airline travel remains supremely safe even despite these incidents.
So when a rare incident happens, it suddenly makes rare incidents more probable?
Either it does not make sense or my statistics-fu is weak.
I am not the person who brought the shooting down of MH17 into a discussion about the TSA.
âAngst and outrageâ over a shoot down is not the same thing as angst and outrage over
You seem to be defending the actions of the TSA, you brought MH17 into a discussion where it was otherwise irrelevant, so I called you on it.
Now youâre bringing another completely irrelevant incident into a discussion about the TSA.
Characterizing people who find fault with the actions of the TSA as âanti-securityâ simply means you donât understand the point of this thread.
The point of this thread, and countless others like it, is that the TSA is security theater. If it provides any actual security, itâs purely accidental.
What security it does provide comes at the cost of treating every one of tens of millions of passengers per year (and thatâs just in the US) as if they were one of the 19 terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks.
Many people find that cost unacceptable, but that doesnât make them âanti-security.â
Fair enough. Anti-âsecurityâ or anti-TSA would better reflect my intended meaning.
Yes, Iâm sure the inability to bring box-cutters, knives, and other sharp objects on planes under the current regime is purely accidental.
And the point remains that the same hindsight bias and absence of comprehensive cost-benefit analysis that led to the current TSA regime is also present in how we look at the Ukraine and March incidents. This isnât a defense of the TSAâitâs a criticism of how we are willing to apply different standards to different types of extremely rare safety problems. As with anything, the cost of bringing risk all the way down to zero is astronomical. In the TSA context many think that the costs are too high and the benefits marginal even if not purely accidental (although according to a recent poll 55% of fliers believe TSA screenings do increase security). But in the Malaysian Air context we seem to misidentify the true costs of eliminating risks because of hindsight bias and/or a belief that the costs are reasonable. I believe the TSA was born out of the same sort of cognitive biases, except that the intensity of these biases was multiplied by the emotional and symbolic intensity of 9/11.
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