They’ve gone too far!

Damn it! That’s now the second time that they’ve searched my bag and my person, the second time that I’ve had to take off my bloody shoes and the second time I’ve got really annoyed with the security people at the airport.

What are they afraid of? ‘Terrorist strikes’ I hear you cry, but no, that’s not really what they’re afraid of. After all, the chance that a terrorist strike actually occurs is very, very small. I wouldn’t be surprised that the chance that you die in a terrorist strike every time you fly is about the same as your chance that you die from a lightning strike, every time you experience a storm. I don’t actually have the figures on that, but it can be worked out pretty easily.

I mean, let’s look at the world in the last ten years; from 1997 to 2007 (before these ridiculous new safety measures) and let’s look at the number of airplanes that were actually destroyed by terrorist strikes. I don’t know the actual number (and I don’t have internet access) but let’s be very liberal and say they managed to destroy and/ or nearly destroy 30 planes in the last 10 years. Let’s also assume that every plane was fully Boeing 747 and was fully loaded (again, being very liberal on my part); that’s about 500 people. So that’s a grand total of 15,000 people that did or could have died. Sounds like a lot, right?

Well, now let’s do the other side of the calculation. Let’s say there are 2000 flights a day (a very conservative number, considering that Frankfurt airport itself probably already operates 500 a day). Let’s be nice and say they’re only half-full; so that’s 250 people per flight. That means that everyday 500,000 people travel. That means that per year (365 days, ignoring leap years) a 182.5 million journeys are made. Multiply that by ten years and you get nearly two billion people travelling.

So what is your chance of dying if you flew in those ten years? 0.008% times the number of times you’ve flown. So, in my case, I think I flew about 20 times in that time, which is quite a lot, so the chance that I would have died in a terrorist strike would have been 0.16% chance. And that’s using numbers madly skewed in favour of the strikes. The word ‘negligible’ jumps to mind.

So why do they do it? Quite simply because of the PR backlash if they don’t do it and a plane goes down. You see, people don’t get statistics. They don’t make these types of calculations, they never had to. They hear of one successful terrorist strike in five years and automatically assume the risk is great (the amount of attention paid to a way of dying is the assumed chance of it happening X the perceived horror of dying in that way).

So I have to suffer through half an hour of indignities every single damned time I fly because of the potential PR backlash that will be directed at airports if they don’t implement these ridiculous safety measures, because people are statistical morons! The airports know the safety measures aren’t essential and probably don’t reduce the chance of a terrorist strikes, but they have to do it because otherwise the unwashed masses will have their heads if something does go wrong (and probably even if it doesn’t).

So there we go, the proletariat have once again shafted everybody up the heiny by leaping before they look. Thank you everybody, for once again ruining my mood.

Well, at least I got a blog post out of it.