I was with you until the very end of your post here...

Thousands of people are hit by drunk drivers or other accidental injuries
and deaths caused by motor vehicles. Quite a number more than those that
are killed in airplane incidents.

A Ryder Truck was used to kill thousands of people in Oklahoma City. And
yet it didn't take very long for Ryder Trucks to go back to normal renting
operations.

Thousands of people have died in Amtrak accidents either because they were
in a train that derailed, or because they were hit by a train as they
walked or drove across the tracks.

Heck - people in New York City died recently in a Staten Island Ferry
accident, and yet no security measures were taken there...

Little or nothing has been done to modify the security of these modes of
transportation, yet the REALITY is that these machines are equally as
dangerous as airplanes.

To take it a step further, thousands of innocent people have been killed by
knives, guns, and electric shocks. People get killed when their ovens and
microwaves explode. Some people even get killed simply by falling down the
stairs in their own homes, or drowning in their own bathtubs, or lighting
their homes on fire with a cigarette.

And yet little has been done to protect people from their own "dangerous
machines".

The reason the airline industry gets hit harder with all this security
bulls&*^ is because there are far more people who are insecure about flying
to begin with. Most people don't have an irrational fear of riding in a
train. Many people take trains every day. Or if they drive somewhere, they
cross a railroad track or see a train riding alongside the highway. It's a
normal, every day occurrance.

Many people, on the other hand, have never flown in a plane, or fly very
infrequently. They don't regularly look up, or if they do, the planes are
too high and obscure for them to see. They don't realize how many planes
and passengers fly safely every day. They only hear about the accidents. If
they see a train wreck on TV, they know that there are millions of trains
that rode that day. So it's an unfortunate incident that is dismissed
pretty readily. If they hear about a plane incident, they somehow believe
that it is the only plane that took off that day, and it could have been
them.

That and they probably have an irrational fear of heights anyway...

Anyway, fear is a funny thing. It makes people believe that if they show
their driver's license to a guy in a white uniform, they are somehow safer
because bad guys would never do such a thing...


(Michael) wrote in
om:

snip
The airlines are operating dangerous machinery that can be and has
been used to kill thousands of people on the ground who never
consented to the risk. It is their responsibility to secure that
machinery from unauthorized persons, thus security is a normal cost of
doing business. If this makes them non-competitive on certain routes
with other forms of transportation such as cars, trains, or light
airplanes, that's just too bad. Maybe we really don't need airline
flights from Houston to Austin. If foreign carrirers won't implement
security procedures, we are under no obligation to permit them to
operate in our airspace.

Michael