Originally Posted by
richarddd
There are about 24,000 commercial flights a day.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/
If implemented for domestic flights, it's likely many people will choose to drive rather than fly, increasing auto deaths, but no one seems to care about that. Similarly, no one seems to care about the risks of attacks on airport security lines. There are many ways to decrease deaths that are much cheaper than increasing airplane security.
I have been surprised for many years that we haven't seen an attack on an airport security line yet (at least in the US...the only such attack I know of was the Istanbul attack, and it was one of the deadlier terror attacks outside of places like Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years). I won't list them here but there are some airports that I'm familiar with where the security setup is basically a deathtrap if a team of attackers were to start shooting. In some cases you could have the people disperse into the terminal but in others you've got effective dead ends because of the way the airport transport system is designed. Of course, this also goes for any sort of security-related bottleneck. FWIW I remember this first coming to mind on a trip something like nine or ten years ago when I observed a massive crowd at an airport over Thanksgiving weekend.