Protesting about Protests
From today’s Toronto Star:
Heather Mallick thinks that “Something has gone terribly wrong if you can’t get on a plane without your unspeakables being stroked by the plastic-gloved hands of a paid stranger.”
Remember, we are focused on Clear Thinking; this isn’t about politics or profits; just logic.
Here is the only real test about whether you’d prefer to be screened, scanned, naked, patted down, grope or whatever:
Imagine that you are on a commercial flight from Here to There. It’s easy enough for you to do – just think of the last commercial flight you were on.
Now imagine that the guy/gal from the seat in front of you gets up and, standing within arms reach of you announces in a loud voice: “I have a gun/bomb/dynamite”.
Or else imagine that the bomb has just gone off; a large chunk of plane is missing and all sorts of debris is being sucked out of the hole, and you can see the stars (or the sun) from the hole in the side. You are weightless.
Now ask yourself this question: “Given that I have no more than 5 minutes left to live, would I be willing to rewind this scenario and have a more rigorous pre-boarding search of everybody, no exceptions?”.
I thought so.
The trouble is this: We can’t go back and ask any of the thousands of passengers who died as a direct result of saboteurs smuggling deadly tools onto commercial flights.
It is all very well to sit in an armchair and scream about civil liberties. Those who would scream the loudest in favor of screening are not able to scream at all.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
And then today’s Star carries a comment by a traveler:
“I think there ought to be two flights,” said Jacksonville, Fla., native Marc Gruber, 53, who was at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport. “One for people who want to be scanned and one for people who don’t want to be scanned.”
Right on!
Especially as the do-not-scan flights would occur about once a week, as distinct from once per hour for the rest of us.
Addled Statistics
From today’s Toronto Star:
“Pearson named worst airport in Canada”.
It all depends, as by now you know, on one’s definition of “worst” or even “best”.
Me, I live right under the flight path and love watching the Big Birds float overhead on their way to touchdown on 33L.
More flights would just make YYZ even better, from my point of view.
But Naman Budhdeo, CEO of FlightNetwork.com thinks differently.
About numbers.
The Toronto Star report states its finding as percentages, as in “The number one gripe, at 18 per cent, was bad service”, and that’s after saying that 800 Canadians (not travelers!) were polled.
Naman’s refutation is “It makes sense that Pearson would have the highest vote for ‘worst’ airport based on the fact that it is Canada’s busiest airport.”.
Wrong. Utterly wrong.
You can doubt the reports based on too-small a sample size (which was not done), but you can’t refute percentage claims with absolute quantity terms.
If anything, YYZ being Canada’s busiest airport should be yielding a better sample. YYZ ought to have a better class of passengers, better in terms of better educated (business types with MBAs or just international travelers from Holland and Singapore who have experienced different airports around the world).
Who is FlightNetwork.com?
From their web site: “Why have I never heard about Flight Network? … all of our visitors and customers have come to our site mainly via search engines or other websites. … you’ve never seen us in print ads or heard our name on TV or the radio.”
But now they have branched out into free publicity via a print ad cunningly disguised as a news story in a large city newspaper.
“Last year alone, approximately half the population of Canada visited our website at least once.”
I doubt this, since we are discussing numeric facts.
I doubt that half the population of Canada uses the internet, and I certainly doubt that half the population of Canada uses the internet to research flights. Even more do I doubt that half the population of Canada uses the internet to research flights on FlightNetwork.com.
But they wish!
