ScreamingEagle
Gold Member
- Jul 5, 2004
- 13,399
- 1,707
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- #21
These same morons will now be running our healthcare system as ineptly as they are running the NSA. scary isn't it!!! God help us!!! Morons need apply Obama and friends will find you incompetants a new joB in the healthcare industry!!!
There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?Let's expand Joyner's scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).
Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Odds of Airborne Terror
Exactly! As originally stated terrorists are "less deadly than lightening strikes and peanut allergies"...
So how much more humiliation will Americans take? When will we stop frisking grandma and the babies, stop submitting to body scans, stop spending 3 hours to board a plane, stop taking our shoes and clothes off, carry whatever personal items we wish, go to the bathroom when we want to.....etc., etc.?
Americans need to resist this Homeland Security "training" that is being implemented through the airlines....we should not be afraid to move about freely....there are much more effective methods of surveillance....
Or do you think Americans should wear "taser bracelets" when flying.....?
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