The National Business Travel Association surveyed 150 travel managers and found that the vast majority, 81%, have no plans to reduce business travel out of concerns about the Dec. 25 Northwest Airlines flight attempted bombing.
While 43% expressed safety concerns about the incident and 42% had no new concerns about air safety, NBTA Executive Director and COO Michael McCormick says: “NBTA encourages governments and airports to strike the proper balance of safety and efficiency in these new regulations and future policy changes.”
McCormick calls for improvements to physical screening, watch lists and “risk-management programs.”
But, is there really a proper balance between air safety and efficiency, and is risk management the way to go?
Travel companies — albeit somewhat understandably — always are ready to downplay security concerns because worries among leisure and business travelers will impact airlines, cruise lines, hotels, car rental companies — the gamut of travel companies.
But, “balance” and “risk management” conjure images of some people having to go through trace and bulk explosives detection equipment, or whole body imaging scanners, and other people being allowed to skip the process.
Under the Jan. 4 TSA regulations, 100% of the people who take flights originating or stopping in 14 terror states or countries of interest will get enhanced physical screening, and only “a majority” of the remainder of travelers will get such treatment.
Thus, a minority — who knows how large — will slip through without rigorous screening.
In a Tnooz post here, an ex-U.S. counter-terrorism official likened risk-based approaches — i.e. “threat-based security” — to Kreskin trying “to figure out where the threat came from.â€
It only takes one person to pass through unscreened to get a bomb onboard an airliner.
Does the right balance mean your plane beat the odds and landed safely when perhaps someone else’s plane was unlucky enough to get blown to bits?
Just asking.
According to Bruce Schneier and many other security experts, all the TSA has done over the last decade has contributed a net total of nothing whatsoever to airport and aircraft safety, apart from the reinforcement of the cockpit doors.
I don’t believe any of these ridiculous safeguards and restrictions, from millimeter wave to random pat-downs, have a prayer of finding a mere 100 grams of PETN, supposedly enough to blow out an aircraft cabin wall. 100 grams! That can be fit into the sleeve of a book or used to line the case of a laptop, or stored in a hundred other undetectable ways, with no scanning or sniffing tech capable of detecting it if the explosive is laminated and carefully cleaned before packing it. Even the CEO of one of the millimeter wave tech firms has said that these scanners are ineffective in many cases. They can detect someone carrying a plastic gun or something like that, not some kind of material substance that can take on any shape.
So they might as well just get rid of all the gate and airport security, get rid of the ridiculous in-flight procedures, and just pay for a few more air marshals to ride more flights to help prevent further 9/11 style hijackings. Apart from that, well, it’s only through terrorist incompetence and random good luck (and also due to law-enforcement and intelligence activity away from the airport) that there haven’t been more successful attacks, not due to TSA measures.
I don’t want to give up safety in exchange for efficiency. I want them to get technology that works. It exists and doesn’t require expensive new hardware.
[NB: edited to remove URL - you posted an almost identical comment on another Tnooz post]
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