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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.

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Odds of Airborne Terror

If you take 9/11 out of the picture, which is when we got serious about this stuff, the U.S. has a near perfect record. Two attempts out of 16,553,385 filghts, both failures.

The system works.

(via ericmortensen)

(via apsies)

I think Eric’s point is right, but it’s actually even more extreme than that. If there were 99,320,309 flights between Jan 1, 2000 and Dec 31, 2009, let’s assume that they’re evenly distributed over those 120 months (so 827,669 (.24…) flights per month).

In the 99 months since Sept 11, 2001 then there should have been about 81,939,255 flights, meaning that the real incidence of terror attempts on US flights since 9/11 is really about 1 in 40,969,627. As a contrast, the odds of matching five numbers in the Powerball lottery (and winning $200,000) is 1 in 5,138,133, or about 8 times more likely.

Source: ericmortensen