The last two failed attempts to bomb airplanes in the US were carried out by passengers who boarded in Europe, and yet both attempts have resulted in changed security procedures in the US. At the same time, Jim DeMint (R-South Whackolina) has blocked the confirmation of the head of TSA out of fears TSA could become unionized. Security for air travel has become political theater.

Missing from all the panic over the attempted bombings is any perspective on the frequency of the attacks. From this NOAA site, it can be determined that there are approximately 10 million commercial flights each year in the the US. That means that in the eight years between the two attacks (and since security was increased immediately after 9/11), we have had two flights affected out of about 80 million, or an attack rate of one for every 40 million flights.

The intense screening procedures for air travel implemented after 9/11 addressed the failure of the previous practices to detect the weapons smuggled onboard by the hijackers. These changes have been effective, and no flights have been hijacked since then. However, some of the changes in response to the two failed bombing attempts appear to be less justified. The three ounce limit on liquids seems on the surface to be an acknowledgment of the power of peroxide-based explosives, but both failed bombing attempts relied on solid PETN-based explosives.

A permanent change resulting from the shoe bomb attack was the practice of subjecting shoes to X-ray analysis. As the more recent underwear bomb attack demonstrated, there are places other than shoes to conceal materials like PETN (in a Tweet this morning, KagroX noted that Britney Spears and Sharon Stone are now off his terrorist watch list). Less understandable, however, are the changes in procedures during the last hour of flights. Fortunately, these changes appear to be mostly on foreign flights coming into the US, but now that word is out of increased scrutiny during the last hour, what value do these extreme measures really have when it would be so easy to change the timing of a planned attack?

Finally, this attack has highlighted the absurd hypocrisy of Jim DeMint’s blocking of the confirmation of Obama’s nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration. If the country (especially the media and Republicans) is going to insist on air travel with zero risk of attacks, shouldn’t we at least have a TSA Administrator? Isn’t the risk of TSA unionizing a bit low on the list of risks to our country?

But, even with a TSA Administrator in place, is it really feasible to come up with a security system that can reduce the failure rate below one in forty million? How much money should be spent in such an attempt? What is an acceptable level of intrusiveness to achieve greater security?

Update: As Casual Observer notes in comment number 2, the NOAA risk from lightning is much higher than the risk of flights being attacked. From this site, NOAA shows 58 deaths per year in a US population of 300 million, or a risk of one in 5 million. Casual Observer cites one in 500,000 for being struck; either way, the lightning risk is higher whether we are looking at being hit or dying.