Airports and Airlines are helpless

Airports and airlines are virtually powerless to stop a repeat of the tragic suicide bombing that killed dozens in Brussels on Tuesday.

Calls to move the check-in perimeter further away from terminals only moves the problem - it does not solve it.

See Geoffrey Thomas on Bloomberg below 

Wherever people congregate - for whatever reason - you have a target.

The scale of the conundrum facing aviation security agencies is enormous.

This year 3.7 billion people - half the world’s population - will travel by air on more than 100,000 flights day.

It is simply mission impossible.

And it will be an impossible ask for passengers on a one hour flight to check in four hours early to go through three or four security checks at a remote location from the airport terminal.

And it would achieve nothing except move any explosion into a car park.

This level of security would paralyse air travel as we know it.

And the cost of a greatly enhanced security system would be staggering.

Since 911 the significantly enhanced security measures and related costs have soared to over 1 trillion dollars in the US alone.

In a paper Terror and the Economy: Which Institutions Help Mitigate the Damage? delivered in 2011 Professors John Mueller from Ohio State University and Professor Mark Stewart from the University of Newcastle in NSW warned that officials did not seemed to have conducted risk assessment and cost-benefit assessments.

In 2002 the 9/11 commission urged the US government to apply cost-benefit accounting measures to its security measures. 

However this was never done according to the paper with the result that according to The Economist nearly all but the most useless and stupid security measures have been approved.