One of the most annoying things about the current wave of pointless security measures at airports is the hypocrisy, as illustrated by this story found via Natalie Solent.
As long as duty free shops exist in their current form, there is no logic in banning people from carrying anything less dangerous than a broken vodka bottle – which is quite dangerous.
There are three possible explanations for this discrepancy. One is that terrorists will tend to be fundamentalist Muslims, and therefore can’t bring themselves to drink alcohol. I quite like this theory, especially since it implies the best way to ensure airline security would be to compel everyone to drink whiskey shots at check-in and turn away the weirdos who refuse. However, I’d question its real-world applicability.
The second possibility is that airport and airline authorities are really, really, really stupid, and therefore haven’t registered that this is a possibility. While it’s true that most people who work in airport security, and many people who work in airport management, are really, really, really stupid, I’m optimistic enough to believe that this doesn’t apply to all of them – and once one airport had registered that there was a problem, the news would tend to spread around the airport community.
A third explanation is that it’s not the airport people who are stupid, but the average member of the public: while airport security is an annoying waste of time that has no impact on safety, it makes people who don’t know this feel more comfortable travelling. The airports, understandably if cynically, are happy to indulge them without impacting their duty free margins. This explanation has the added plausibility advantage that people tend to be scared of flying and not cars, even though flying is around a hundred times safer per kilometre travelled.
…and this is why airport security (along with most nannying rules and laws) really annoys me. I don’t appreciate having to waste my time, effort and money, or be forbidden from doing things I want to do, for no reason other than to placate stupid people.
As with your previous comment on this, yeah, airport security has nothing to do with security and lots to do with reassuring the travelling public. How many times have you seen a news story about a bomb being discovered in someone’s luggage, compared to how many times you’ve heard of a plane being blown up by a bomb?
[ach, hit "submit" too soon.]
I flew from Dubai a little while ago and encountered two utterly dumb bits of airport security: (a) they sold food processors — with sharp metal blades three or four inches long — in Duty Free, after confiscating everyone’s toenail clippers at security; (b) the pilots of our flight being X-rayed repeatedly on entry to the departure lounge, until the offending shoes were inspected manually and waved through.
If the pilot wants to destroy the aeroplane, he has easier ways to do it than packing his shoes with explosives….
"flying is around a hundred times safer per kilometre travelled [than a car]"
— be very careful. Risks in flying don’t scale strongly with kilometers travelled, because most air crashes happen on takeoff and landing. Per journey the safety figures don’t show anything like that ratio.