The Odds Of Airborne Terror

The Department of Homeland Security is reviewing airport-security screening practices.
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From FiveThirtyEight:

Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner asks:

There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?

Let's expand Joyner's scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.

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My Comment: The 135+ comments are worth reading also.