Comment by bawolff
15 hours ago
Other then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Northern_Airlines_Flight... how often has anyone ever set fire to a plane (not counting bombs that caused fires). Is there even a single other example.
I agree on guns, but you can probably deal with that with much lower intensity security.
A year ago Air Busan Flight 391 burned completely after a single passenger power bank caught fire on the overhead compartment, and crew couldn't extinguish it. If that had happened on a plane that was in middle of an ocean for example, it would have been almost certainly a total loss with everyone dead, or at least ditching into the sea.
You're right that fortunately there aren't many cases of people causing fires inside airliners on purpose. But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. When a single power bank can cause catastrophic results like this, I'm glad there's at least some monitoring of what people carry into the airplane in their bags.
You claim comfort from monitoring, and yet the easiest source of fire on a plane is z lithium battery. Which are expressly allowed.
In other words the TSA specifically does not seek yo prevent fires. The reason we don't have people setting fires on planes is because people don't want to do that. And if they did the TSA would be specifically useless in preventing it.