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Sunday, July 29, 2012

TSA All the Way!

Prompted by Jennifer's latest rant, I tried to find some numbers about air travel. The governement's website is down.



Figures, but then I found this on the International Air Transport Association's website:
Date: 24 October 2007

Passenger numbers to reach 2.75 billion by 2011

(DAMASCUS, Syria) The International Air Transport Association (IATA) released passenger and freight traffic forecasts projecting that in 2011 the air transport industry will handle 2.75 billion passengers (620 million more passengers than in 2006) and 36 million tonnes of international freight (7.5 million tonnes more than in 2006).
Syria? Seriously? Of course this was almost five years ago, back when the current unpleasantness was only simmering on low heat, not boiling over and onto the front page of the world's newspapers.

Air traffic fell off sharply after those crazy Saudi's hijacked four airliners and deliberately crashed them back in September of 2001. Air traffic has increased somewhat since then, but I don't think it has recovered completely, at least not in the US. The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) and their onerous "security" measures are partly to blame. Airline executives should have something to say, but I'm not hearing anything. I did find this one story that offers a couple of really feeble excuses.

Bonus quote from 2010 with lots of numbers from reDesign:
What the media don’t talk about is that flying is incredibly safe. 2 million people a day fly in the U.S. That’s more than 700 million people a year. In the last 9 years, there have been:
  • More than 300,000 deaths in car crashes.
  • More than 130,000 people murdered.
  • Exactly zero fatalities from aviation terrorism in the U.S., 6.6 billion passengers and zero fatalities.
Everything we do in life has a risk to it. Taking a shower, walking down the street, going to the mall.

I travel between 50,000 and 100,000 miles a year most years. I also travel on larger planes and to and from foreign countries. My risk of dying in a terrorism-related plane crash is much greater than that of the average American. (16% of Americans have never flown; another 37% fly less than once a year.) But I’m not worried because I know the risk is so unbelievably tiny it’s not worth worrying about. The TSA’s new procedures don’t reduce that already insignificant risk.

The Cinnabon at the airport food court is a bigger threat to your health and well being than a terrorist is. And, by the way, what the TSA doesn’t want you to know is that the guy working behind the counter at the Cinnabon didn’t have to go through security.

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