Geek woman news story of possible interest...

Tue Sep 25 20:59:13 UTC 2007

Gary Layng wrote:

What a load of nonsense fearmongering.

> As has been proven repeatedly, aircraft are terribly vulnerable to attack, 
> which results in much higher casualties than any other form of transportation.
You've got to be joking. The death rate per-person-travelling is much
higher on the road than it is in the air. Sources listed below.

Please indicate where you find stats showing "higher casualties than any
other form of transportation" -- everything I've seen indicates otherwise.

The ensuing "argument" offers both poor facts and poor arguing techniques:

> They come with their own "bomb load" (jet fuel) and can be steered into places that vehicles, ships and trains cannot go.
Any mode has its places it can go that others cannot. Arguably the most
flexible in this regard is the bicycle. Given how compact explosives are
these days, you can deliver a fairly large payload on a Segway too. What
the heck, you can deliver plenty just strapped to your body into lots of
places a 747 can't fit.

Also: current formulas of jet fuel are designed as to be highly
resistant to explosion.

> Take one down, you take down anywhere up to 500 people, plus the people on the ground.
Fact: the largest aircraft in Air Canada's fleet has a capacity of 349.
The vast majority of aircraft are far smaller, and the large capacity
ones attract higher security.

> You don't even need to physically step on board, like with Pan Am or Air 
> India, or be physically on board when the bomb goes off, as happened to a 
> Pacific air carrier when it was bombed by an Islamic terrorist - he placed 
> the bomb and walked off the aircraft.  (Last I heard, he was still behind 
> bars in the Phillipines.)
>   
Funny how the airline you'd figure to be the one most attacked --
Israel's El Al -- is also the most secure (no successful hits or
hijackings yet). Its planes are equipped with anti-missile  defence.
Security of this kind is possible on all airlines if the will exists,
just like high standards of maintenance.

> Suspicious of liquids on board?  Blame that British terrorist who tried to 
> detonate his shoes.  Ludicrous sounding, but cabin fires can spread rather 
> quickly and are notoriously difficult to extinguish.  See the Swissair 
> disaster, or a similar one involving an Air Canada DC-9.
>   
More fearmongering. It's quite telling that you have to go back so far
in time for an example that Air Canada was still flying DC-9s (it was
1983, for anyone actually tracking facts). The Swissair flight was a
DC-10, an aircraft no longer made and used by only a handful of major
airlines. New aircraft are far more fire-resistant than ever.

In any case, the debating tactic of connecting shoe bomb to cabin fires
is not very useful here.

> Bomb a train, you tie up the line for a few hours and kill some of the people 
> in the compartment, which may be as few as 10 people.
So when talking about aircraft you say "as much as" and about other
modes, "as few as"... what kind of crap is that? Airplanes can go
airborne with "as few as 10 people" and _current_ trains can easily
carry more than 500. Derail a high-speed train and you _do_ get deaths.

> Bomb a train station or airport terminal, and you'll get a handful of souls if that.
Spoken by someone who's never had to endure a passenger terminal at its
peak. Consider that all of those air passengers had to stand in line to
check in. Visit Terminal 1 at about 7pm most nights (most European
flights leave early evening) and talk about a 'handful of souls'... what
rubbish.

> Detonate a  truck bomb (say, the size of the one Timothy McVeigh used) in the middle of a 
> span of the Boor Viaduct and you'd disrupt life in Toronto for days, weeks, 
> maybe months
So the Bloor Viadict is a poor target. There are others. It should be
noted that McVeigh did his damage using a truck as a delivery vehicle
and the target was a regular office building.

> Hijack a typical ship, even an oil tanker, and congratulations you have a large, slowly-moving, use-once-and-discard battering ram - we don't send many ships with Mount 
> Blanc's cargo of munitions from Point A to Point B much anymore, as World War 
> I ended some time ago.
>   
Many of the newest superships are equipped with more than 3,500 berths
(talk about sitting ducks!), not to mention lots of people who slept
through the lifeboat drill.

Even better targets (should one be looking) are overcrowded ferries,
which sail with hundreds of people and often miserable safety
facilities. A fatal accident on one of those happened as recently as a
month ago in Egypt, and another in Sierra Leone killed about 150.

> So yes, if you want to do spectacular damage, aircraft remain our civilization's biggest soft spot.
>   
Absolute BS. The paranoia about planes comes more from human
claustrophobia and helplessness while in the air than anything else.
Certainly not fact.

> And people doing crazy things
...like claiming that flying kills more people than driving. You
probably thought that "Snakes on a Plane" was based on a true story.

OTOH, facts can be your friends...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/travel/reports/03092000/TINFO.html
http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/0203/Jan20_03/18.shtml
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/16237

- Evan

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