There were dozens of terror attacks against air travel in the 80s and 90s. The global post-9/11 "security theater" did make flying in the developing world much safer.

Really? So that’s attributable to us not carrying bottles of water and to us taking our shoes off?

Yes, everyone knows that terrorists can't take off their shoes.

There's been dozens of hijackings since 9/11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#20...

To be fair there's been a lot less hijackings in the 2000s and 2010s compared with previous decades - although as the decline started in the 90's - its not likely to be solely due to increased security.

It has to do with several things, among them you have:

- the end of the cold war, with the clear hegemony of the US which halted state-sponsored terrorism from unaligned-but-socialist-minded countries (especially Libya)

- targeted assassination of terrorist leaders and infrastructures (no more training summer camps) no matter the country they are in (mostly through drones nowadays), leading to a progressive reduction in sophistication in terror attacks committed, and the rise of lone wolfs instead of structured terrorist commandos.

That lists twenty, and the minimum to be "dozens" would be 24.

Grammatically, 1.5 donut is wrong and 1.5 donuts is correct. So, in this case "1.66~ dozens" (because 20 / 12 = 1.66~) is pedantically correct.

(...But logically and intuitively everything I just said is extremely stupid because by that logic 12.01 counts as "dozens" and that's ridiculous, so your complaint is absolutely correct and I agree with you 100%)

Grammatically, 0.2 donut is wrong also. So by that logic, 0.01 also counts as dozens.

I'd argue that "dozens" obviously means there are a multiple of 12.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hijackings occurred, on average, once every five days globally.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-ai...

I always attributed that to:

  - before 9/11, the advice was: sit down in your seat and wait for the ransom demands

  - after 9/11: fight for your life now or die in a blaze of fire

Hijackers must feel this too. No quarter will be given.

Wasn't that a contributing factor to UA93 being "unsuccessful"? The passengers had gotten word of the other three flights, and stopped being quite as compliant (though "compliant" is obviously not the full story for the other three flights).

Yes! Without this incident, I wouldn't be as optimistic about people fighting back. Turns out, people can be pretty rational after all.

The TSA checks are ineffective, they fail detection 95% of the time [1]. That's a pretty good indication that it's security theater.

Personally, I'd expect the decrease to be mostly attributable to increased cockpit access security like locked reinforced doors.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...