Airplane Security
Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 8:45 am
OK, there are a bunch of reports out now, about pilots who object to having to go through airplane security stuff (they do not like patdowns, which they liken to sexual assaults; they do not like microwave scanners, which they believe increase their risk of cancer, which is already elevated due to their high altitude flying; etc.)
Well. Is there really any rational reason for requiring pilots to go through that? Apart from the fact that all pilots have to undergo FBI screening before they are even allowed to become pilots, what, really, is the threat they pose? I guess Homeland Security is concerned that a rogue pilot might take a weapon on board a plane and take control of the aircraft.
I suppose we could turn this into a political thread-- 'You want people like this to run [fill in the blank for some program you do not want the federal government to run]?'-- but this seems to go way beyond political stupidity, it is just a moronic waste of resources (I have heard that there are people advocating that EVERYONE demand a pat-down search; insofar as there are not enough TSA lackeys to conduct pat-downs on 100% of the passengers, this would bring the system to a crashing halt; the problem with that tactic, of course, is that the TSA doesn't care, it would just provide more job security for them).
In the banking world, and elsewhere in the real world, people manage their lives with reasonable risk assessments: everyone knows you cannot stop every bad thing that can possibly happen, so you direct your resources against the highest, most likely areas of risk. In the fraud area, banks identify patterns of behavior suggestive of potential fraud, and focus their efforts on that; as they learn about more types of fraud, they expand their parameters (all the while being politically correct, of course: in the Legal Department here, we used to have a file called 'Nigerian Letters,' which was where we kept and monitored, well, Nigerian Letters, which was a shorthand for, well, Nigerian-based scams; someone decided that this name might be offensive to some, so, although 100% of the items in the file were, in fact, Nigerian letters, faxes and e-mails, we relabelled it to avoid offending anyone). In real life, you know a young child is more likely to hurt herself/himself with a knife than a fork, and more likely to hurt herself/himself with a fork than a spoon, so you introduce the child gradually to cutlery, starting with spoons and working up to knives. But the TSA stuff is just whack, they assume EVERYONE poses the SAME level of risk, and insist on the same level of loss prevention for EVERYONE.
I swear, if those people have their way, we will eventually have to travel naked, in medically induced comas, with our luggage traveling separately in robot planes.
Well. Is there really any rational reason for requiring pilots to go through that? Apart from the fact that all pilots have to undergo FBI screening before they are even allowed to become pilots, what, really, is the threat they pose? I guess Homeland Security is concerned that a rogue pilot might take a weapon on board a plane and take control of the aircraft.
I suppose we could turn this into a political thread-- 'You want people like this to run [fill in the blank for some program you do not want the federal government to run]?'-- but this seems to go way beyond political stupidity, it is just a moronic waste of resources (I have heard that there are people advocating that EVERYONE demand a pat-down search; insofar as there are not enough TSA lackeys to conduct pat-downs on 100% of the passengers, this would bring the system to a crashing halt; the problem with that tactic, of course, is that the TSA doesn't care, it would just provide more job security for them).
In the banking world, and elsewhere in the real world, people manage their lives with reasonable risk assessments: everyone knows you cannot stop every bad thing that can possibly happen, so you direct your resources against the highest, most likely areas of risk. In the fraud area, banks identify patterns of behavior suggestive of potential fraud, and focus their efforts on that; as they learn about more types of fraud, they expand their parameters (all the while being politically correct, of course: in the Legal Department here, we used to have a file called 'Nigerian Letters,' which was where we kept and monitored, well, Nigerian Letters, which was a shorthand for, well, Nigerian-based scams; someone decided that this name might be offensive to some, so, although 100% of the items in the file were, in fact, Nigerian letters, faxes and e-mails, we relabelled it to avoid offending anyone). In real life, you know a young child is more likely to hurt herself/himself with a knife than a fork, and more likely to hurt herself/himself with a fork than a spoon, so you introduce the child gradually to cutlery, starting with spoons and working up to knives. But the TSA stuff is just whack, they assume EVERYONE poses the SAME level of risk, and insist on the same level of loss prevention for EVERYONE.
I swear, if those people have their way, we will eventually have to travel naked, in medically induced comas, with our luggage traveling separately in robot planes.
