Winging It: Keep attempted airliner attack in perspective

Since a couple of days after Christmas, I've become afraid, very afraid.

It's not flying that makes me fearful. I'm afraid I'll go insane if I have to listen to another news report that leaves us with the impression that it's suddenly become much more dangerous to fly on a commercial airline.

I'm not making light of what happened on Dec. 25 on the Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, or dismissing the attempted bombing as unimportant.

It's important to know that taxpayers have spent billions of dollars to try to keep would-be terrorists off airplanes, yet intelligence officials missed the warning signs about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab until he was already winging it over the Atlantic.

President Obama sent the right message last week, taking responsibility for the failure of officials and bureaucrats - many of them on the job long before he took office - to recognize the Nigerian as a threat, and vowing to do better.

As the Associated Press reported, Obama hinted at the difficulties of improving intelligence and security against determined terrorists who seem to find new ways to threaten us as quickly as we can devise defenses.

"There is, of course, no foolproof solution," he said. "We have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary."

But let's stop and take a deep breath here.

Let's think about how travel security has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, and how the system at least helped to prevent the Christmas Day attempt from succeeding.

Millions of people who want or need to fly on a business or leisure trip this month, this year, and for years to come are still going to do it, safely and without incident.

The resilience of those who live their lives on the road was made clear by a National Business Travel Association survey of 150 of its corporate travel manager members.

About four in 10 of the managers said the attempted attack made them more concerned about airline security while an equal number said they weren't any more worried than they were before Dec. 25. Eighty-one percent of the officials said their organizations wouldn't reduce travel because of the incident.

Perhaps the intrepid travel managers have been thinking along the same lines as a handful of security experts. Through the cacophony of criticism of what went wrong in this case, some security specialists say we should focus on what went right and how, in a sense, we were at least a half-step ahead of al-Qaeda's latest effort.

Bruce Schneier, a consultant and author of nine books on various aspects of security, pointed out on his blog (www.schneier.com/blog) last week that because airports screen passengers and luggage for weapons and bombs, the terrorists were severely limited in what they could do.

Whoever built Abdulmutallab's device "had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise," Schneier wrote. "Instead of using a timer or a plunger or a reliable detonation mechanism, as would any commercial user of PETN, he had to resort to an ad hoc and much more inefficient home-brew mechanism: one involving a syringe and 20 minutes in the lavatory and we don't know exactly what else. And it didn't work."

Schneier, on the blog and in an interview, went on to say that concealing an explosive in clothing isn't a new threat - it's at least a decade old - but it isn't something airport screeners anywhere in the world have been able to detect.

The best-available technology, the full-body scanners that will be installed at more airports, also could miss explosives hidden in a body cavity or spread in a thin layer on a garment, he added.

"For years, I've said that exactly two things have made us safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door and convincing passengers that they need to fight back," Schneier wrote. "It was the second of these that, on Christmas Day, quickly subdued Abdulmutallab after he set his pants on fire."

In most ways, though, as Schneier and many others point out, we deal with various threats by looking backward. Ban weapons from planes, and box cutters are used. Search for box cutters and shoes are used. We take off our shoes and liquids are used. We ban liquids and underwear becomes a weapon.

What has succeeded in uncovering terrorist plots is intelligence gathering and old-fashioned police work, followed by a rapid response. That's what stopped the London scheme to use liquids to blow up airplanes before it happened in 2006.

Here's Schneier's last piece of advice, and it's the same one we've heard repeatedly since 9/11: Do all we can to stop terrorism but worry more about life's other risks.

Six U.S. airline flights have been terrorist targets since 1999, four on 9/11, one by the shoe bomber, and one by the underwear bomber.

According to calculations found on the www.fivethirtyeight.com Web site, during the same period, there have been more than 99.3 million commercial flight departures, making the odds of being on one targeted 1 in 16.5 million.

What are the odds of being murdered in this country? One in 18,000. Of dying in a transportation accident? One in 77.

For me, the scariest statistic of all on the Web site is this: The odds of being on a plane with a drunken pilot are 1 in 117.

at 215-854-2454 or tbelden@phillynews.com.