Geek woman news story of possible interest...

Tue Sep 25 23:20:51 UTC 2007

--- Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.

Well, there is the whole lies, damn lies and
statistics thing. On a per-passenger mile basis travel
by air is far safer than any other form of mass
transit. On a per passenger hour basis the numbers do
change significantly...

> 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.

Well, there is the Boeing 747-300SR which can be
configured to carry over 600 people for short haul
flights. The biggest operator of the 747-300SR is
Japan Airlines and they have all of 12 of the aircraft
(keeping in mind that with some of the crowded
airports in Japan a short haul HIGH capacity aircraft
makes some economic sense, but the Japanese domestic
air travel market is NOT typical :-) ).

> > 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.

Not true. July 23, 1968 El Al had its first (and to
date ONLY) successful hijacking (of a flight from
Rome, Italy, to Lod, Israel, the flight ended up in
Algiers). Since then El Al has poured a massive amount
of money in to making sure what happened in 1968
doesn't happen again... There in is part of the issue,
how much money is safety worth, El Al's answer has
been "a lot", other airlines the answer being "not
quite as much"... 

> > 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.

Well, New York City operates a number of ferries
between the city and Staten Island. The largest two
ferries are rated for up to 6,000 passengers (mind
you, how often those two ferries travel at (or near)
their limit may be a very different question). 

Now, I don't know what the softest of soft targets is
(quite frankly I probably don't want want to know). 

What I do know is that the technology required to
knock down an airline in flight while it clearly
exists in terrorist hands (a small plane and a trained
pilot with a death wish would do), there are far
softer targets that a nutbar with a cause could hit.
This was shown by  Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols
who with a rented truck fertilizer and fuel oil showed
that loonies with a cause could cause mass havoc...

> > 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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