Geek woman news story of possible interest...

Wed Sep 26 03:10:44 UTC 2007

On 9/25/07, 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.
>
> Please indicate where you find stats showing "higher casualties than any
> other form of transportation" -- everything I've seen indicates otherwise.

This seems more a question of metrics...

Yes, plane crashes are relatively infrequent, but the casualty rates
*when they DO happen* are commonly 100% of those aboard, plus
bystanders.

In contrast, in the most famous naval disaster of history, about 1/3
of the passengers of the Titanic survived.

> 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.

E = 1/2 m x v^2

The fact that an aircraft can travel hundreds of km/h faster than
other sorts of vehicles means that simply out of the motion of the
aircraft, there's a *big* whack of energy to be released if it strikes
something.

That's not paranoia - that's just basic physics.

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

That seems to fly in the face of the way jet fuel works.  For it to
function as aircraft fuel, it needs to *cause* explosions, and there's
no question but that the fuel is an inflammable energy source to add
to 1/2 mv^2

> > 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.

I'd agree that most aircraft are more in the 200 passenger range.
That tendancy, of course, varies from airline to airline and from
location to location.

The last time I was at Heathrow, I watched a lineup of aircraft, every
single one of which was a Boeing 747.  (Then my MD-11 appeared...)

> > 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.

The racial profiling they do is something that our airlines would
likely find themselves chastized for.

> > 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.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that one of the phenomenon that is
taking place is that security measures are being chosen on the basis
of governments needing to be seen to be "doing something" as opposed
to the notions of necessary and sufficient efficacy.

You might be right about that this characterization of the "danger of
liquids" is nonsense.

But I'm not sure but that security measures are being set up on the
basis of "nonsense" of that very sort.

> > 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.

But we haven't got any "high speed" trains, not on this continent...

> > 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.

There may be plenty more *people*, but that doesn't mean that they'd
all be killed.

Crash a 737 and nobody will walk away, with a high potential of a
couple hundred deaths.

Even with a pretty big anorak, in a pretty crowded terminal, it would
be difficult for a personally-carried explosive device to get a
fraction of that.

> > 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.

No, in contrast, this suggests that it's a pretty *good* target.

> > 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.

But unlike with a plane, if you shut the engines down, it's not "30
seconds until you have 250 pancakes."

> 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.

I think you're right; ferries are likely amongst the most vulnerable
possible targets.

> > 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.

But the reaction that came when Al Qaeda attacked the "flight system"
in 2001 says that this *is* right.  Aircraft may not be the easiest
targets, but I don't think there's any argument but that they
represent  a pretty ultimate example of "spectacular damage."
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
"...  memory leaks  are  quite acceptable  in  many applications  ..."
(Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++, page 220)
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists