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 t
is instructive to catch the emotions on the fly. They do not always
yield self-esteem. You furtively hope the bullet will hit the other
guy not you. The airplane crashes and instinctively you hope it
wasn't a terrorist who did it. But a moment later you start thinking
about statistics. Maybe it would be better if it were a terrorist
strike. Fleeting thoughts go down memory lane.
How many casualties
have come to us through terrorism in the last 20 years of flying?
The civilian victims of September 11 can't be counted because, like
nuclear bombs, they overwhelm the picture. So you ask, how many
planes have met death on account of terrorist activity? The four
spectacular planes of September 11. Then you need to go back to
the Egyptian plane whose copilot decided to commit suicide and took
everyone down to the sea — on the other hand, that wasn't exactly
terrorism, was it? But of course the big one was Lockerbie, 270
dead from terrorist action on a Pan American flight headed for the
U.S. And one Air India plane off Ireland in 1985.
The thought
materializes: If Monday's New York accident comes in as a terrorist
episode, that's bad, but less bad than if it is a maintenance act.
Because in the world of data, the chances of losing your life in
flight on account of terrorist activity are lower than on account
of mechanical failure. These are very low, and tend to diminish
every year. At last year's rate, you could fly, say, 1 million flights
before finding yourself on the plane with the marginal vulnerability.
But (the statistics are raging through the mind), you could fly
20 million flights before you'd find yourself on a plane
struck down by terrorists.
Besides, you
say to yourself, there is a full-blown war going on against terrorist
activity. At the level of mechanical safety, it can be said that
there is constant concern to avoid critical problems in the air,
but that is a steady kind of thing, not to be compared with the
explosion of concern triggered by September 11. One commentator
on the Jim Lehrer show was asked whether it was easy for a skilled
mechanic so to disrupt a jet engine of the type carried by the fatal
airbus to make it fall off. Yes, he said. For a skilled mechanic
very easy. However, he said, it was flatly inconceivable that it
should happen, given airplane-security procedures. It is one thing
to let somebody slip by who is carrying a knife in his briefcase,
another to permit someone four hours in an airplane engine with
a dozen screwdrivers and filaments of explosive.
So — the
thinking is, on Tuesday — the problem was mechanical. The implications
of mechanical imperfections work their way into the thinking of
the irresolute. Back at school when, teaching basic economics, they
tried to impress on us the importance of the marginal consumer,
they'd say something on the order of: If the Ford Motor Company
produces two million automobiles in a year, they lose a lot of money.
If they produce two million and one automobiles, they'll make a
billion dollars.
The model is
exaggerated, but the point survives. The airlines are doing about
25 percent less business than before September 11 and they are losing
their shirts. The marginal passenger on an airplane costs (virtually)
nothing; his absence costs economic survival. The Los Angeles
Times writes of Eugene and Nikey Key of Palm Desert, scheduled
to fly on Delta Air Lines Flight 136 Monday morning from LAX to
New York. They've been around the world by plane and ship six times.
They canceled. "His wife said she was simply afraid."
So we read
of futuristic devices. Take that useful prefix going the rounds
— "bio" — and stick it up before "metrics."
Biometrics! "Arriving at New York's La Guardia Airport, an
American Airlines passenger proceeds to the nearest kiosk. After
swiping her smart card through machine, she presses her index finger
on pad attached to the device in order to confirm that she's the
authorized holder of the card and her boarding pass is printed.
At the gate, she puts her finger on another reading device to reconfirm
her identity, then steps onto the plane."
Yes, and with
biometrics we make progress on security of the kind they worried
about on Monday. But that doesn't bring us security against mechanical
failures.
For that, you
need counter-gravitational devices, and they are out of this world.
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