What a shambles. The recent Heathrow stuff up is just another example of how a small minority can really fuck things up for the rest of the world, But I’m not blaming the terrorists this time round. Don’t get me wrong, if you are found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, then like paedophiles and rapists, you should forfeit your human rights, and be forced to live in a hole, but this rant is about the Anglo-Am authorities.
How the hell is not taking laptops, mobile phones and toothpaste onto a flight going to prevent it from blowing up?
Not wanting to get shut down under the terror act, but if you are going to take liquid explosive onto a plane, why not just swallow it in a time release bag so that when it get to the acid in your stomach it explodes. You are going to die anyway, why make checking in more of a pain for the rest of us.
The government also want to shut down bomb making sites. Why! This is like illegalising hard drug taking, has that stopped people taking hard drugs? no, it just drives the whole activity underground where you cannot monitor it. Leave the sites alone and use them as a resource to see what people are making so you can arm your scanners and detectors.
Why not upgrade scanners, detectors and staff at airports? well the British Aviation Authority say that they can only stump up so much cost and the airlines won’t pick up the rest of the tab. This – like the spate of rail crashes we had a few years back – is yet another example of how profit and safety are completely inappropriate business allies.
Interestingly, British Airways reported £195M pre-tax profits for the first quarter of 2006 which was up 57% on last year.
Some businesses should be run for the benefit of the people, not for the benefit of the rich. Can you imagine what would happen if the NHS was privatised?
Bear this thought in mind next time you fly. security is a risk management business. You weigh the cost of something happening against the cost of preventing it from happening.
An example:
- Assume that the cost of a plane going down due to some activity is £1M and the likelihood of this happening is 1 per year.
- Assume the cost of managing extra staff, research and development of new detection techniques and the cost of hardware is £1.1M per year.
What do you think the likelihood of the extra measures being implemented are?
General Motors were sued in the 80’s for something similar. They had a problem in the braking system of a new car, that meant 1 in 5,000 cars would fail. The cost of recalling and fixing every car was estimated at something in the region of $5Bn. The cost from company image damage, lawsuits from the families of the people who died, and the development of a detection test and subsequent replacement of faulty parts was estimated at $1.5Bn – they settled out of court, and then subsequently tested every one of the cars over 2 years after the fault was found.