Freedom Of Movement
I recently returned from a whirlwind 2-week tour of parts Asian and Antipodean, visiting Bangkok, Koh Samui, Singapore, and Sydney. It's a lot of ground to cover for 2 weeks, and the pictures are available here. But the trip, itself, is not what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about some things that went down while I was away.
About half-way through the first week of my trip, the news came through that police in Britain had captured 21 individuals suspected of plotting to simultaneously bomb U.S.-bound commercial aircraft, using liquid explosives with everyday consumer electronics equipment as detonators. If you're connected enough to be reading this post, you certainly know the rest of the story. Liquids were banned from all flights in the U.S. and the U.K., British authorities for a time banned all carry-on luggage, long security lines ensued, etc.
And I'll remind you that this all happened while I was in the midst of a concentrated two-week spate of air travel, the likes of which most individuals will never engage in.
Now, given the amount of flying I do, the news was unsettling. But it wasn't unsettling because, suddenly, the prospect of renewed air terrorism was made much more palpable by these arrests. No, it was unsettling because I'm starting to believe there's no end to the indignity travellers will be willing to accept in the name of presumed "safety."
This really hit me as I was in the departure lounge at Singapore's Changi Airport, waiting for my flight to Sydney. The flight I was taking was the continuation of a flight from London, and as I walked the departure hall I saw a parade of flyers having just arrived from London, plastic sandwich bags in hand stuffed with wallets, passports, and Kleenex, looking just a little bit more miserable than one typically would, having just emerged from 13 hours on an airplane.
Watching these walking corpses, I couldn't help but wonder if they were comforted by the illusion of safety. Because, the new regulations notwithstanding, safety in air travel is an illusion. It's an illusion supported by the fact that upwards of 99% of commercial flights take off and land successfully year in and year out, but it's an illusion nonetheless.
There is nothing empirically "safe" about loading oneself into a giant metal tube strapped with explosive jet fuel and more moving parts than one would care to consider, and then riding that tube to an altitude of 6 miles. Throw in the fact that there's an extremely small, yet highly motivated, part of the flying population whose overriding goal is to make said tube go boom, and the absurdity of any notion of safety becomes clear.
Let me be clear: life is full of risks, and getting on an airplane will always be a risk.
But you, me, everybody — we all fly. We accept the risk and instead take comfort in the 99-plus% statistic, because we can't bear staying at home, and because flying from London to New York is much faster and marginally less tiring than swimming from London to New York.
But then September 11th happens, and our illusion of safety is shattered, and we all panic, and say thank heavens we've only got plastic knives on planes now, we're much safer now.
And then that complete idiot tries to blow up a plane with his shoe, and we all panic, and say that if we just take off our shoes and put them directly on the belt, we'll all be safe.
And now, some people figure out that our x-ray machines can't detect liquid explosives, and we all panic, thinking we'll be OK as long as we can live without our water bottles on the plane.
And we wait patiently for our illusion to be shattered again, so we can all panic, and realise that a body cavity search is the only thing standing between us and airline safety.
Who the hell are we kidding?
Again, let me be clear: if a group of people decides they really, really want to blow up an airplane, they will find a way to get the necessary materiel past (or around) the C students who are working the checkpoints. It's a question of will, and where there is a will, there is a way. No system is foolproof.
Our ability to stop people from blowing up airplanes rests not at the security checkpoint, but rather in the ability of our police and other law-enforcement agencies to ferret out these plots before they, ahem, get off the ground.
And it's extremely important that we realise this soon, because short of the aforementioned body cavity search, or a complete ban on hand luggage on aircraft, there's not much farther to go at the security checkpoint.
There are a few things we desperately need to do, and soon:
1. We need to accept that any flight we get on at any time could go down for any reason, but that such an eventuality is highly unlikely.
2. We need to acknowledge that there are things in life beyond our reasonable control, and that we go about our business anyway.
3. We need to come to a reasonable accommodation regarding airport security, that prevents as much danger as possible, while recognising that our iPods, water bottles, and butter knives present no realistic threat to the flight we're boarding.
4. We need to accept that we can't plug all the holes, and that whatever areas we focus on leaves other areas vulnerable.
5. We need to accept that planes will go down, for whatever reason, and that panic and overreaction make that likelihood stronger, not weaker.
There has to be some kind of happy medium between "safety" and the humiliating dressing-down we face at the airport.