Let's see.
They check bags for bombs and little pairs of scissors.
They scan everybody and get good shots of them totally naked under their clothes, in case they are carrying explosives on their body.
They randomly check people with tests for explosives.
They often then check bags again before going in planes.
And on any one given day, some people can load bombs in the food trays of planes across the country, where each bomb only has a 50% chance of being detected.
Why do you think Fox has not made the aviation industry safer?
Regards,
Renato
As strange as it sounds, just because a risk exists, does not mean that it needs to be plugged. The first step in risk management is about determining the likelihood of an event happening, the likely outcome of if that event comes to fruition.
When determining the likelihood of an event happening, you also need to look at mitigating factors, is there things which prevent the event from happening further up the chain? Is there other things there that would likely reduce the severity of the event should it happen?
There is also a matter of limited resources when determining how to handle risks. In some cases handling removes that risk factor full stop, in other cases that risk factor has mitigation which reduces either the likelihood or severity.
Now to pick on the matter of limited resources and bring it back to this, how does the TSA officer truly know what risk assessments have been done? Unless that officer has been directly involved in the formation of the risk matrix, with the full data available, they can not possibly know the full extent of risks.
That brings me to my second point. There is always limited resources, limited person-power, limited money. Therefore it is important to dedicate those resources to where they will do the most good. A proper risk matrix will tell you where to dedicate resources to reduce or eliminate the highest risks whilst keeping the system still workable.
So as a counter to "scanning of food trucks means we're safer", I would offer the following counter points.
- What if every single employee in the catering company had undergone a proper background check?
- What if in taking resources to scan food trucks it means that baggage scanning is now under-resourced, and thus baggage from the general public is now more likely to be accepted onto a plane without proper security checking?
- What if the training for how to safely scan food to ensure contamination did not occur it redirected resources from programs which actually mitigate proven risk?
- What if the food safety guidelines were not followed, food contamination occurred?
Now yes, there is certainly value in some security theater, if nothing else it stops the crazies and opportunists, but in saying that where do you think the real aircraft security happens? I'll give you a hint, its got very little to do with the officer sitting at the airport.