> That said, if your security is overly deficient then you may be fined by the regulators/inspectors, not to mention that having an actual incident (not yet implemented) would cause your airport to be viewed less favorably by the airlines & their passengers.
The big problem with modeling incidents is going to be that it has very little to do with airport security at all, which is almost all pure theater. For example screening for knives is useless because anyone can make a shiv in an airport bathroom the same way prisoners do. Even explosives are not particularly any more dangerous on a plane than they would be in a subway car or anything like that (in the sense that they can kill 100% of passengers in both cases). Checking for ID only causes the terrorists to choose a person with no priors as the one who carries out the attack.
And attacks are adaptive. Banning twelve ounce bottles when you can have both ten three ounce bottles and an arbitrarily large empty tub is classic theater.
The main reason there haven't been any repeats of 9/11 is that as of 9/11 all passengers are on notice that resisting hijackers is mandatory, and even a terrorist with a knife can't fend off 100 passengers at once.
So much of the security theater also has financial motives. Checking ID prevents the resale of non-refundable tickets. Prohibiting 12 ounce bottles encourages people to buy one inside the airport for five times the grocery store price. Makers of expensive scanning equipment are in favor of mandates or subsidies for expensive scanning equipment.
You could add a lobbying component to the game. If you're an airport you want to defend the profit-generating ID checks against criticism from privacy and immigrant advocates, but oppose mandates for security scanners you have to pay for when their manufacturers lobby for them.
> We have definitely had discussions on this exact topic -- potentially allowing absolutely zero security -- and it's something we may revisit in the future.
One answer might be to let the user choose what country to set up shop in, and then some hypothetical countries might have less security bureaucracy but other disadvantages (like not being able to have direct flights to high bureaucracy countries).
> For example screening for knives is useless because anyone can make a shiv in an airport bathroom the same way prisoners do.
I'd never really thought about shivs before, but I've always felt that the available materials in duty free (after security) must be more than sufficient to blow a hole in the side of a plane (lots of aerosols etc)?
I guess the additional danger comes with a plane lands somewhere and a train has far less potential to cause massive collateral damage. However looking at the tube bombings in London it is clearly possible to make a decent fist of terror using trains.
>The main reason there haven't been any repeats of 9/11 is that as of 9/11 all passengers are on notice that resisting hijackers is mandatory, and even a terrorist with a knife can't fend off 100 passengers at once.
I disagree. The changes to cockpit doors are far far more relevant, it's simply not practical to take control of a plane through threat of violence (plus all pilots are now aware they won't necessarily be hostages - they'll be weapons). Yes a bladed weapon will only let you harm a small number of passengers before being overwhelmed - but a couple of guns probably achieves the same. The clear difference being the chance of depressurising the cabin.
> I'd never really thought about shivs before, but I've always felt that the available materials in duty free (after security) must be more than sufficient to blow a hole in the side of a plane (lots of aerosols etc)?
The reason explosives are only a minor threat to planes isn't that it would be hard to get one through, it's that the threat it poses isn't specific to planes.
> I guess the additional danger comes with a plane lands somewhere and a train has far less potential to cause massive collateral damage.
That isn't much of an attack vector when you can't choose the target. Nearly all of "somewhere" is bodies of water and open space.
> However looking at the tube bombings in London it is clearly possible to make a decent fist of terror using trains.
It's not about trains either. Someone could drive a car bomb into a nightclub.
A lot of the smaller attacks that have actually happened would have been dramatically worse if we hadn't lucked into the fact that the terrorists were incompetent. Although there may be a shared causation in that correlation.
> The changes to cockpit doors are far far more relevant, it's simply not practical to take control of a plane through threat of violence
Those are also a help, though somewhat of a risk too if a terrorist actually managed to get into the cockpit.
> Yes a bladed weapon will only let you harm a small number of passengers before being overwhelmed - but a couple of guns probably achieves the same. The clear difference being the chance of depressurising the cabin.
That changes nothing. Given the choice between certain death or likely death while saving a thousand people on the ground, the decision remains clear.
The big problem with modeling incidents is going to be that it has very little to do with airport security at all, which is almost all pure theater. For example screening for knives is useless because anyone can make a shiv in an airport bathroom the same way prisoners do. Even explosives are not particularly any more dangerous on a plane than they would be in a subway car or anything like that (in the sense that they can kill 100% of passengers in both cases). Checking for ID only causes the terrorists to choose a person with no priors as the one who carries out the attack.
And attacks are adaptive. Banning twelve ounce bottles when you can have both ten three ounce bottles and an arbitrarily large empty tub is classic theater.
The main reason there haven't been any repeats of 9/11 is that as of 9/11 all passengers are on notice that resisting hijackers is mandatory, and even a terrorist with a knife can't fend off 100 passengers at once.
So much of the security theater also has financial motives. Checking ID prevents the resale of non-refundable tickets. Prohibiting 12 ounce bottles encourages people to buy one inside the airport for five times the grocery store price. Makers of expensive scanning equipment are in favor of mandates or subsidies for expensive scanning equipment.
You could add a lobbying component to the game. If you're an airport you want to defend the profit-generating ID checks against criticism from privacy and immigrant advocates, but oppose mandates for security scanners you have to pay for when their manufacturers lobby for them.
> We have definitely had discussions on this exact topic -- potentially allowing absolutely zero security -- and it's something we may revisit in the future.
One answer might be to let the user choose what country to set up shop in, and then some hypothetical countries might have less security bureaucracy but other disadvantages (like not being able to have direct flights to high bureaucracy countries).