Quote:
Originally posted by lurkette
For the first time in a long time, I find myself afraid of flying. I have to go to San Francisco next week, Sept 9-12, and I'm weirded out by the proximity of my travel to September 11. I know it's just a date and security will be really high, but I still find myself breathing shallowly and on the edge of a panic attack.
Can anyone help provide some rational counterpoint to my deranged imaginings? I'm less worried about hijackers than about surface-to-air missiles, bombs, biological attacks on major cities like the one I'll be in, etc.
Help!
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Aside from the fact that the odds of anything happening are very small:
1) San Francisco? A major city? Maybe San Franciscans think so, but nobody else does. Nice place to eat a crab and enjoy the scenery, that's about it. (I say this as a former resident.) Also, when you think about Muslim terrorism targets, you're generally talking about very large metro areas with very large Muslim populations nearby in which terrorists can find shelter. The San Francisco Bay Area doesn't have that. Frankly, all terrorism targets so far have been on the Eastern Seaboard, where the population is thickest and the powerbrokers live. That's likely to continue to be the case. We're too spread-out out here to be a good terrorist target, except maybe in a very few small spots.
2) Al Quaeda and their ilk aren't doing surface-to-air missiles. They do bombs. Bombs are easy. They understand bombs. The hijacked airliners made sense to them because they could see them as big bombs.
SAMs are another matter, and much riskier to obtain and use than simple explosives.
3) No bomb is getting on your airliner. While I don't fly, numerous friends have talked about the absolute hassle of getting themselves and their luggage through security at the airport these days. Unless getting a bomb on a plane is easy, terrorists won't do it.
4) Biological attacks sound fearsome, but again these guys don't really have the technology; and there isn't some place where you can easily obtain this stuff. By the fact that there have been no real biological attacks, with the exception of some mystery envelopes, one can assume that there probably will be none. Like everybody else, terrorists do what's easy. Bioweapons are not easy.
I'm stressing easy/not easy because most terrorists are amateurs, and they know they are. So they like simple plans that are likely to work, not complicated ones that require skill and precise execution. The 9/11 plan was about as complex as they could actually handle; four guys had to get a little basic flight training. Everything else was low-tech. Now that America is alerted it would be very hard to hijack a plane again, or commandeer a truck or train of toxic material, or blow up a bridge, or anything. These things are being monitored. Doing them is... no longer easy.