[neilv]

1. Are super-organized, highly-capable, fully-sane terrorists the only threat? Or does the threat model include mentally-ill / personality disorder people, who might make mistakes, or taunt those whose job it is to stop them? Or include people of either kind, who create diversions? Or include people who make a statement in an unexpected way?

2. Did the captain, flight control, and everyone else who needed to decide, have definitive information that the report was only an innocuous Bluetooth advertisement for an innocuous consumer device, and somehow knew that no other threat was going on? If not, then I'd commend whomever decided to follow protocol, and err on the side of inconveniencing a lot of people, rather than risk tragedies that the protocol was designed to prevent.

[Zak]

Landing the plane because of something that could be interpreted as a bomb threat without waiting to be sure it was intended that way seems like a precaution on the far end of reasonable, but still reasonable.

Demanding that people disable Bluetooth does not seem reasonable. If there's an actual bomber, tipping them off that you're reacting to their threat might lead them to set off the bomb early. Similarly, demanding that someone shut off the "Free Palestine, F Zionists" WiFi network or the flight crew will call the FBI is counterproductive; if that's cause to call the FBI, just call them. A warning lets the person cover their tracks.

For the record, "BOMB" is probably cause to call the FBI and "Free Palestine, F Zionists" by itself almost certainly isn't, but is something to mention when calling them about "BOMB".

[mlyle]

Here's the options:

- You have an actual bomb that's been slipped onto someone else's stuff that is cellphone triggered; perhaps when you get to UK cellular service, perhaps after cabin altitude + time, or whatever. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You want to turn back in this case.

- You have a person who has a device with a name in bad taste, either because of humor or malice. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You would rather not turn back in this case. They might turn it off.

- You have a person who is controlling the actual bomb on the plane. Making the announcement or turning back or even continuing -- it doesn't matter. Your moves are visible to them.

[lallysingh]

This was a teenager. Then again, there's a whole line of bluetooth speakers called "SoundBomb." And lots and lots more products named "Boom" (still, yes) in some way. There isn't any need for this to be anything more than a reasonable name for a speaker.

[godelski]

Now take your scenarios and weight them by their probabilities

  - 0.001%
  - 99.998%
  - 0.001%

If you think I'm exaggerating here, you're right, but in the conservative direction. There are 44k flights in the US PER DAY. There have been 8 bombings, *since 9/11*[0]. 4 of those involved US craft (not all passenger craft either), and *0* of them succeeded. My numbers are an over-estimate if you take all 8 and count it against a single day of US flights. If we take those 8 bombs, across 24 years of US flights you get closer to 0.000002%, and that's still conservative.

I'm sorry, but the risk is just stupid low. There's only 2 lotteries in America that you have a better chance of winning than these absurdly conservative odds (no lottery if you use non-conservative statistics).

I'm sorry, but even if there were a dozen bombing attempts a year this would still be an absurdly safe activity given the shear volume of flights per day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a...

[srean]

What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.

I agree with your comments more often than not, I empathize with your annoyance, but if you play out the game theoretic consequences there are no non-annoying outcomes. I don't like it but that's how it is.

Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. One potentially chipped thermal insulation ceramic tile, should we engage reentry or not. What are the odds that the tile did get chipped, what are the consequences if it did.

The only good way to play this is for a country to not act in ways that motivates potential acts of organized terrorism. That would leave only the positively deranged solitary cuckoo brains to deal with.

[godelski]

  > What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.

Lower than walking outside and finding the winning powerball ticket and getting struck by lightning. It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life. It doesn't matter that I know this has happened to somebody, that's just statistics.

  > Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through.

Are you afraid that a country is going to randomly drop a nuke on you? I bet you aren't. Same with a building bombing. Or a dirty bomb. Or any number of things.

Remember, I didn't say the odds are 0, I said these are extremely black swan events. In fact, there's a lot of more likely ways to die on a plane that are far more likely. If you aren't afraid of those, then your fear is fear, not reality.

[srean]

I agree with you. Acts of terrorism are black swan events. Question is do we as humanity have the stomach to not act on low probability cues and eat the one off consequences. I don't think we do.

I think the only way to play this is to ensure that terrorism against us continues to be only rare, unorganised black swans and not an act of any organized and motivated entity.

Coming back to this case. Say this was an operational error by incompetent terrorists. The pilot reports the observation but does nothing. The bomb goes off. Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats. They are declared professionally incompetent and insurance cover is denied to their family.

I can well imagine current administration doing exactly that, throwing the pilot and the crew under the bus. The 911 first responders were and they weren't even in a position to prevent it. Maybe the pilot and crew can imagine that too and in that case they took a rational decision.

Do not forget that this

https://youtu.be/_uYpDC3SRpM?si=lOWfqPEPCxTGu_Vj (Jon Stewart to the Congress for first responders)

is the society we live in.

[anang]

> It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life.

Another take: the likelihood of getting struck by lightening surely dictates what you do during a thunderstorm? In the same way that the likelihood (or lack there of) dictates how often you buy lottery tickets.

If we didn’t attempt to mitigate terrorist attacks at all, would they be as infrequent as they are now? I know that’s not really what you’re saying, but surely likelihood is extremely dependent on circumstances.

[CWuestefeld]

I think godelski is being far too permissive in his odds. As he says, we need to examine how (un)likely is it that somebody is trying to execute this terrorist action, including being competent enough to create a workable bomb, to sneak it through security, and so forth. That's all his numbers show.

But we've also got to factor in

A) How likely is it that this bomb is going to have some bluetooth component? It seems like needless complexity, so we should weigh strongly against this. Further, it's less likely that our hypothetical terrorist needs to have expertise in this domain as well.

B) How likely is it that he would clearly paint the word "BOMB" on the side of his device (figuratively, of course, since this is digital)? That's amazing levels of stupidity. And then intersect that with the claim that he's competent in all the other things (bomb making, sneaking through security, making a bluetooth trigger for his bomb) but is so incredibly stupid that he'd label it a bomb.

Factoring all of this in, godelski is being far too generous in assessing this with odds similar to finding the winning Powerball ticket outside the front door while simultaneously being hit by lightning.

I acknowledge that the airline captain has some responsibility for our security. But part of this responsibility is being a steward for our overall well-being. And in this case, the "security" aspect is so vastly overwhelmed by the damage it did to passengers in other ways, that it was obviously a bad call on the captain's part.

[godelski]

Oh for sure. I'm admittedly several orders of magnitude too conservative in the simple case. I'll be honest, I expect that to be several orders of magnitude conservative to reality, as you point out.

It's exactly why I'm telling people they are being crazy in this thread. Because people are still defending the "Free Palestine, F Israel" device name as if it's a threat. The supposed threat there is that this starts a fight on the plane. To which the obvious answer is to arrest the person that gets so irritated by a trivial to ignore protest that they decide to start a fight on a plane. Arresting the person making the tacky protest is crazy. The logic people are arguing for is "arrest an annoying person because their annoyance might cause a crazy person to act crazy". Why isn't the answer "arrest the crazy person?" This whole thread is batshit levels of insane

[zdp7]

If you were the FBI, much higher than you are assuming. Read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot . The FBI had the plans for the foiled first attempt for 9/11.

[mlyle]

Sure, which is why you tell people to turn the device off and only when that completely fails do you take greater corrective action.

I do think we overreact on security matters, but I do think it's reasonable to not head over the Atlantic with something labelled "BOMB" if you can't figure it out.

I think if you set the amount of security to zero you'd get more bombings. Before 1990 we had a 2-3 per decade. This may not sound like much, but given that we have about 0-0.5 airliner crashes with fatality per year, it would be a significant contribution.

[godelski]

We're not just talking things labeled "bomb" here. TFA has a very different example that's not so easily arguable as that.

[brigandish]

Risk is not a synonym for the likelihood of something happening, but the likelihood and its possible effect.

For example, the risk of not wearing your seatbelt on the motorway is high because, even though most journeys will not require a seatbelt to stop any negative effects, if something bad happens it will become very high risk without the seatbelt.

Without the negative effect there is no risk, so it's not just probability.

[godelski]

What are the risks? That people die. Do you know how many people died of preventable things just today?

Or it's scary because it means we're going to go to war? Then why aren't we scared sooner? Be scared of the thing that causes people to want to blow up planes. It's not like they just wake up one day and a country decides it's going to blow up a plane. Our government spies off so many people and the result is we're still scared to get on planes? What a waste of money

[brigandish]

I encourage you to look in to how risk is calculated. There are several ways, and all of them - excepting layman's attempts and Claude Haiku responses - are on a spectrum, not a binary. They do not resemble what you have provided.

[danaris]

As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk.

That's not a sane way to do risk management. You have to be able to use common-sense human judgement as well as situational training.

And common-sense human judgement would tell you that, even if the possible effect is a plane full of people blowing up and that starting a war, the likelihood of that occurring because you didn't yell at a teenager to turn off a Bluetooth device is so infinitesimally small that it's not worth considering.

[brigandish]

Your first two statements are a straw man and thus, become a non-sequitur.

> As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk.

The possible effect is not effectively infinite in magnitude, and no, it does not justify any level of response. Even if a rogue state decided to bomb a plane, that would not justify a nuclear strike in response.

The common sense that you urge is already being applied, and based on well established, well tested protocol. It's not authoritarian to tell someone to turn off their bluetooth on an aeroplane because they named it in an offensive way. That's common sense.

[jMyles]

> Landing the plane because of something that could be interpreted as a bomb threat without waiting to be sure it was intended that way seems like a precaution on the far end of reasonable, but still reasonable.

To qualify even for the 'far end of reasonable', you'd have to divert the plane. Returning to origin, especially when the origin is not one of the 10 closest airports and is in a much more densely packed urban area (with a much more harrowing approach) than any of those 10 renders this entire incident totally unserious.

There are real actual safety concerns to address in aviation. This doesn't make the top 1,000 list. It's wasted effort in a world where economy of opportunity is significant.

[navigate8310]

> Passengers on the flight arrived back in Newark just before 9:00 PM on Saturday evening, and were met by a significant contingent of local and federal law enforcement.

If you'll actually read the article, federal law enforcement was being called in this situation as well.

[adgjlsfhk1]

does landing a plane early due to a bomb threat seem reasonable? either there is a bomb, in which case landing early won't help, or there isn't, in which case landing early won't help

[switchbak]

Certainly telling them to turn off bluetooth will not have any positive effect, if there was a bomb I presume it would only have a negative effect.

But some people are really dumb when it comes to having common sense with respect to tech (or non-tech too, hehe).

[dualvariable]

It seems pretty obvious to me that this situation was being treated more like a disruptive passenger issue than an actual terrorist threat of a real bomb. So more like the Minneapolis plane diverted to Wisconsin the other day because of an unruly passenger. They took everyone and their devices through screening after deplaning, and it sounds like they found the teenager who owned the device. That was the point of turning around.

They probably do have to treat it seriously just in the unlikely chance it turns out to be some mentally unstable person's way of legitimately making a terroristic threat. But it also needs to be treated similarly to a drunk and violent person who needs to be duct taped to their seat until they can get handed off to the authorities.

[mlyle]

Terrorists doing completely stupid stuff, like naming a cellphone "bomb" that they plan to use to control a bomb is par for the course. Forgetting to turn off bluetooth is a plausible next mistake.

Terrorists have a pretty long history of making these kinds of basic operational errors, and if you don't act like they may be real, you miss the opportunity to disrupt/prevent these operations.

[godelski]

The whole conversation is moot anyways. What's the actual odds of getting on an airplane that is going to be the target of a terrorist attack. I'll tell you, they're approximately 0. Far less than 0.0001%.

If you act like they're real you're just going to end up suffering alarm fatigue because the number of actual instances is just so astonishingly low.

Besides that, the terrorists win by creating fear. No damage is necessary. People being afraid to fly is the terrorist's main goal. To get you to think they could be anywhere and are everywhere. It's called a terror campaign because the literal goal is to create terror. Casualties are just a good way for them to achieve that goal, but far from the only way. We spend billions a year to fight a near non-existent threat.

[nephihaha]

Terrorists also work on creating alarm not just hiding their operations.

[ElProlactin]

And how would these stupid terrorists actually get a bomb on a plane?

[roysting]

Should we call the FBI because you have also written the forbidden character set; since you said doing so is probably cause to call the FBI?

[hectormalot]

The thing that surprises me is they flew back to Newark for almost 90 minutes. It doesn't make sense to me.

(1) Either you believe the threat is credible and you put it down at the nearest suitable airport in the least amount of time. Say Sydney at about 200km to your west, or FSP at 150km in the direction you're going (not a great fit, but doable). In both cases you could probably land within 20 minutes, a bit more if you aim for Gander (Fun history for that airport, great as an emergency diversion).

(2) or, you believe the threat is not credible. At this point you might as well continue the flight. Flying 90 minutes back does not seem (to me) to meaningfully reduce the risk if someone is actually planning to trigger a bomb anyway.

[fooqux]

I don't know what it's like to be a pilot, to be responsible for not just your own life and million dollar aircraft, but the hundred-so passengers onboard.

But I do know what it's like working in a draconian safety-crazy job where if you're caught not following a safety-related SOP you're basically fucked.

I can't blame them too much.

[rincebrain]

In this particular case, I think the point is less 1 or 2 but more point 3

(3) the contrapositive, where you continued the flight, it really was someone stupid enough to name the broadcast name of a bomb "BOMB", it goes off, and now you have to explain to the press "we thought nobody would be stupid enough to really name it 'BOMB'"

So you assume it's a low risk event, and tell everyone onboard to turn off their devices to remove the chance it's just someone making a bad joke or a coincidence, and then you end up with the outcome of trying to avoid having to say that in a press conference where everyone is already primed to think you didn't do enough.

[jtbayly]

That makes absolutely no sense. As the previous comment pointed out, turning around is not treating it seriously. If you are trying to save face in the extremely unlikely event that it is real, then the only thing you can do is head to the nearest airport.

[CrendKing]

1) If it really was a bomb and went off, the pilot wouldn't be there to explain to the press anyway.

2) How likely would a bomb's name really be "BOMB" vs anything else? If the latter is any higher, wouldn't it be reasonable to always turn around whenever the any other name shows up? In that case, all Bluetooth devices should be strictly banned in the cabin. But TSA is not doing that (not yet).

[addandsubtract]

If someone is planning on triggering a bomb on a plane, and they haven't done so, you can assume they have a target you haven't reached yet. So going back is not only the safe option, but also the location the people & plane came from.

[rbanffy]

The only thing it protects is the target. If there is a terrorist on board and they expose the fact they are aware of the bomb, or the bomb is minimally capable, the plane is doomed whatever they do.

[blks]

It’s possible conditions weren’t good enough at potential alternatives.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I'd commend whomever decided to follow protocol

Protocol would be quietly diverting to the closest airport. They didn’t do that. They chugged back to Newark. After making a visible scene on the PA. This was a hissy fit.

[jtbayly]

Literally no pilot ever has been able to know that no other threat was going on.

[hammock]

> Are super-organized, highly-capable, fully-sane terrorists the only threat? Or does the threat model include mentally-ill / personality disorder people, who might make mistakes, or taunt those whose job it is to stop them?

I want to think the answer is both. But I cannot think of an example where #2 has actually happened in history resulting in injury or death.

[rbanffy]

There was a guy who hid explosives in a shoe and we had to take off our shoes for many years because of him.

[echoangle]

I don’t know how that contradicts the original comment since that plot didn’t work and didn’t result in deaths or (significant) injuries.

[15155]

The plot worked, the device didn't (nor did it need to.)

[dhosek]

A minor grammar nit. Its commend whoever decided to follow protocol, not whomever. You choose the case of who(m)ever based on its function in the dependent clause not the clause’s function in the sentence.

[PaulStatezny]

A minor spelling nit. It's "it's", not "its", when used as a contraction for "it is". ;)

Sorry, you teed it up too well. I had to!

[dhosek]

Arg, that’s what I get for typing on my phone