Risk assessment FAIL at the FAA

[unixronin]

Pop quiz:

About how many terrorist bombings occur on airliners in any given year?

OK.  Remember that answer.

Now:  About how many rapid depressurization events occur on airliners in any given year?

You don't know?  It's between 40 and 50 per year.

Which makes it completely brainstampingly stupid that the FAA has ordered — quietly, behind the scenes, and without public notice or discussion — that emergency oxygen masks and their oxygen generators be removed from airliner bathrooms, lest terrorists figure out a way to use one to blow up the plane.

Yes, just when you thought they couldn't possibly overreact any further, the bureaucrats who squander our tax dollars for a living have come up with something new to wet their pants over while running around in circles screaming that the sky is falling.  Any time now.  Honest!  Would we lie to you?  It's for the chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiildren!

But don't worry.  They assure us that "Rapid decompression events on commercial aircraft are extremely rare".

Yeah, well, terrorist bombings on aircraft are at least 40 to 50 times rarer.  This is the same kind of "logic" that leads zealots of the Church of Offensively Loud Motorcycle Exhausts to assert that "Them helmet things will kill ya!", because they heard a story once about a rider in Tennessee, or maybe it was Oklahoma, no, wait, Montana, or perhaps Iowa, who [insert freakishly improbable series of events here] and died, because, you know, he was wearing a helmet when the Peterbilt crushed him.

Comments

[hugh_mannity]

I had to look it up, but I remembered the number of hijackings as averaging something like 40/year during the 1970s (mostly from Cuba). It dropped significantly after during the 1990s to around 18/year. So it was for a while a significant risk, however it's important to distinguish the hijackings prior to 9/11 -- where almost all of the passengers survived -- with the use of planes as bombs as happened on 9/11.

The "plane as a bomb" tactic has been very rarely used and while it might be emotionally significant, in practical terms it's a negligible risk and always has been.

You're more likely to die in a cab on the way to the airport than from a hijacking.