The relative infrequency of terrorism incidents in insecure places leads me to believe that either a) our intelligence services are extraordinarily effective, or b) the number of "crazy people" wiling and able to do such a thing is extraordinarily small.

Think about how Americans handle risk; the risk of dying in a plane hijacking is very low. The risk of dying of heart disease if you don't eat well is very high. So we spend a ton of time, effort, and money on preventing plane hijackings, but we eat tons and tons of unhealthy food. You'd think that the reason we have security is to prevent ourselves from dying, but if that's the case, we're doing it very wrong. The reason we have airport security is so that some bureaucrat can get a promotion; armed guards with high-tech tools make people feel like their government loves them. (Except for people with a brain, who think it's a little scary to have to show the cops your charlie browns every time you board a plane.)

I don't even want to think about how much healthy food we could buy with the money we spend on full-body imagers.

so does co-pilot and auxiliary crew

Anyway, the fact that pilot is in full command of the plane doesn't mean that he should be able to bring onboard whatever he desires, does it?

Do you take whatever you desire to work? No, because you don't want to lose your job because you brought in a playmate of the month calendar and a gun.

Its a job to them same as anyone else.

We may also totally skip flight school certification requirement - after all pilots don't want to die either, right?

I don't remember if it's a real quote or if it's from a movie, but an elected official said once (again, a real official or an actor, I'm not sure): "let's have two planes; to get aboard plane A, nobody's searched or even asked a single question; to get aboard plane B you're submitted to the current TSA procedure and more; let's see how many people are willing to fly on plane A".

The answer seems obvious: nobody will ever take plane A (or, only terrorists).

But I'm not so sure. People do very dangerous things all the time. I drive a motor bike in Paris (also when it rains or snows): it's is much more frightening than flying in a commercial airliner, and statistically much more dangerous. But I can't stand the metro, however safe it is.

The point is, there are many motor bikes and bicycles in Paris, so many people make the same trade-off between security and convenience, and prefer convenience.

So, why not try it? You want to be searched and safe, take plane B; make sure to get to the airport 4 hours in advance, though, and to wear clean underpants.

You don't care: take plane A.

Anaphylaxis. This whole thing is anaphylaxis.

A Go through the scanner and be done in two minutes. B Get a pat down and be done in 10-20 minutes.

People just want to get somewhere faster. Many will already take A because it is faster (I know I heard them say it). Plane A would probably be cheaper and faster.

1. If some flights have security procedures and some don't, obviously all malefactors will be attacking the ones that don't. So they'll be more dangerous than if no flights had security procedures.

2. No one is really suggesting having no security procedures at all, so far as I know. The question is how much security overhead we're prepared to put up with, and how much benefit in safety we're actually getting.

I might be reluctant to get on flight A. But if the great majority of flights had simpler quicker security procedures only -- say, 1/4 of the way from flight A to flight B -- then I bet I'd be about as safe on them as I am now with all flights being like flight B.

Back of envelope calculation. Suppose I value my life at $10M, and my time at $50/hour. Then I should be prepared to put up with an hour's timewasting if it saves a 1/200,000 chance of death. The actual rate of violent death for aeroplane passengers over the last half-century or so has never been higher than about 1/5,000,000 per flight (in the 1940s and 1960s; it's been much lower since then even counting 2001-09-11; even if you include non-passengers, who of course made up most of the 9-11 deaths, the figure is still lower for the 2000s than for the 1940s and 1960s), meaning that I should be willing to put up with about 2 minutes of security overhead per flight. In practice, reducing the amount of security checking would probably increase the danger somewhat, so the correct figure is probably more than 2 minutes. I doubt it's more than 15.

Terminology: type 1 flight, no security. Type 2 flight, security.

A. When bad things happen on type 1 flights, people will say 'thats what they get', and not worry too much. Type 2 flights being targeted have more impact.

B. Type 1 flights will presumably be under more scrutiny as a flight -- they will be 1. more restricted in airspace, and 2. be more likely to be shot down in response to deviant behavior, as such less likely usable to reach bad guy goals.

C. Airplanes are expensive enough that the airlines would need to figure out ways to minimize bad guy impact on thier type 1 flights, rather than just hope the security measures are good enough.

Do people want to be strip searched? Well, let's find out. You can take flight A where nobody is strip searched, or flight B where everyone is (all other existing security measures unchanged).

If nobody (but me) is willing to take flight A, we have the answer we're looking for.

My point was that everyone assumes that nobody will take flight A, but in fact we don't really know.

But that's not the point. The point is, there will never be complete safety. It's physically impossible. However, that answer is considered heretical. And while we're at it: the security measures at the airports do exactly nothing to make us any safer either. They're not even designed to do that. They are designed to impress politicians. All that gestapo compliance crap is just a nasty side effect.

As far as this guy is concerned, it's just another variant of "rage quit", because he essentially did this to quit his job. There is no way in hell he didn't know exactly what would happen. After years and years of going through all the motions of Security Theater he chose to do all the things that get you red-flagged. His point was of course to demonstrate that we don't live in a free society anymore. But we knew that for some time now.