Comment Why all the attention on the airplane? (Score 1) 545
The plane isn't the target. Sure, if someone blew up an unoccupied airplane sitting in a hangar somewhere there'd be people mad about it - but as long as there's little danger to the common man, nobody but the insurance agent *really* cares. The true terror target is the people on the plane. Airplanes are effective since there's a few hundred people in a pretty confined space and those people have very little chance of surviving even a moderately successful attack.
So all these security measures will theoretically make it impossible to get anything dangerous on a plane, which is great. But it seems to me we've created another target with the same characteristics - the hundreds of people standing in a queue to go through the screening machines. In fact, there's probably more people in queue at rush times than there are on a single plane, and they're closer together. And there's no real defense since any non-instant bomb detection is sure going to result in long lines.
Kind of ironic that we spend all this time and effort to protect ourselves but wind up creating an even juicier target.
So all these security measures will theoretically make it impossible to get anything dangerous on a plane, which is great. But it seems to me we've created another target with the same characteristics - the hundreds of people standing in a queue to go through the screening machines. In fact, there's probably more people in queue at rush times than there are on a single plane, and they're closer together. And there's no real defense since any non-instant bomb detection is sure going to result in long lines.
Kind of ironic that we spend all this time and effort to protect ourselves but wind up creating an even juicier target.
