How secure is your next flight?

 

One of the reasons I have not flown in quite a long time.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » A Pilot on Airline SecurityAt this moment, there are roughly 5000 commercial airliners in the skies above you. There will be 28,000 flights today, and 840,000 in the next month — every month. The U.S. fleet consists of some 6000 aircraft — almost all of which will be parked unattended tonight at a public airport. We will carry almost 7 billion passengers this year, the number increasing to 10 billion by 2010, barring an exogenous event like another 911.There is simply no deployable technology that has a prayer of keeping a motivated, prepared terrorist out of the system every time — even most times. TSA misses more than 90% of detectable weapons at passenger checkpoints in their own tests, and it is not their fault, because of the limitations of technology and the number of inspections they must conduct. This doesn’t count several classes of completely undetectable weapons like composite knives and liquid explosives. 

 

Author: Khürt Williams

A human who works in information security and enjoys photography, Formula 1 and craft ale.

One thought on “How secure is your next flight?”

  1. I would not cut TSA a complete break. Without going into a long rant I have worked with TSA and they are not innocent. They have incompetent management thanks, in large part, to guaranteed lifetime employment, called Civil Service.

    Under Civil Service mediocrity is pretty much guaranteed, at best. To be expected is a lot of wasted money and resources on the wrong things due to incompetence all the way up the ladder.

    To not hold anyone accountable, as was done with 911 epitomizes the problems that will be with us for years to come.

    Many of the folks I worked with at FAA won't fly anymore. I choose to minimize flying since it is too much of a hassle.

    Bin Laden won on this one. And that is very sad indeed. I cannot say more, due to my clearance, but believe me the TSA is pathetic.

    The worst move was to privatize it when all we needed was improved oversight. At least when it was private people could be fired for imcompetence. Now they "good job Brownie" when they are total failures.

    I am very disappointed in Chertoff. I fell for his pitch about bringing risk management to the TSA. What a lie that was. He is a fraud.

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