Ahhh, air travel • 30 December 2007 • The SnowBlog
Ahhh, air travel
Anyone who's flown somewhere in the last year or two, and has taken off their shoes to do it, will probably enjoy this New York Times blog post by a commercial airline pilot. My favourite part: unpicking the logic of confiscating liquids from travellers. Why is it done? Because they could contain explosives. So what do they do with the potential explosives they confiscate? Dump 'em in a big old bin right next to the queue of people because we all know there are no explosives in there. Personally, I don't understand why it's worth spending billions to stop me dying on a plane, but safety upgrades on trains are allowed to wait for decades because they cost money. Is it really worse to die because of terrorism than because of a preventable accident? Aren't ya just as dead? But then these things never seem to be about actually saving lives.
I was once told I couldn't get on a flight from Edinburgh to London because my passport was out-of-date. I'm talking about an internal flight here. I could have travelled the same route on a train and no one would have cared whether I could prove who I was, but planes are different. Despite the Madrid bombings, it's still all about preventing an exact re-run of 9/11.
Rob
Anyone who's flown somewhere in the last year or two, and has taken off their shoes to do it, will probably enjoy this New York Times blog post by a commercial airline pilot. My favourite part: unpicking the logic of confiscating liquids from travellers. Why is it done? Because they could contain explosives. So what do they do with the potential explosives they confiscate? Dump 'em in a big old bin right next to the queue of people because we all know there are no explosives in there. Personally, I don't understand why it's worth spending billions to stop me dying on a plane, but safety upgrades on trains are allowed to wait for decades because they cost money. Is it really worse to die because of terrorism than because of a preventable accident? Aren't ya just as dead? But then these things never seem to be about actually saving lives.
I was once told I couldn't get on a flight from Edinburgh to London because my passport was out-of-date. I'm talking about an internal flight here. I could have travelled the same route on a train and no one would have cared whether I could prove who I was, but planes are different. Despite the Madrid bombings, it's still all about preventing an exact re-run of 9/11.