I completely agree that everyone should be footing the bill for security, not just pax. People on the ground are getting just as much protection from planes crashing into buildings or bombs blowing up planes and airplane parts falling on them. Even though my house isn't on fire, if the neighbor's house burns out of control because we don't have a fire department, mine might eventually catch fire too.

As for the cost/benefit of implementing the sytem, it's really difficult to assess. We know there are people out there who have evil intentions. We know that they're well funded and possibly could get together some type of bomb, like Richard Reid did with his powerful shoe bomb. We also know that it's relatively easy to get one on a plane these days, if you don't mind going down with the plane.

What's more difficult to calculate is how much a plane being blown out of the sky would cost. You've got the cost of the plane, the cost of anything it damages on the ground, investigation by the FBI, hunt for suspects and multi-year trial, the year long NTSB investigation, possible closure of airspace for a time so that other planes can be searched (which is really expensive, look at how much that jerk in ATL cost by shutting down the terminal), lost productivity of pax and people on the ground injured or killed, negative effects on the markets or economy, etc.

And, you'll scare a lot more people scared into not flying. A USA Today poll released yesterday found that 44% of people are afraid to fly. A bomb bringing down a plane is going to insure that these 44% probably never get on a plane again, or at least not until there have been a few incident free years, plus there'll be a lot of people who weren't afraid to fly before but are now. And you'll see companies that don't allow employees to travel or scale back on travel because they're afraid of losing valuable employees. Many companies did this after 9/11 and some still are. That's going to cost a lot, especially since each biz traveler probably adds up to 2 or 3 leisure travelers.

I'm not an economics expert, but I think the costs associated with one plane being brought down are pretty high. Now imagine if the terrorists pulled another 9/11 style and brought down two, three, four planes like this. Or even worse would be to bring down one plane a day for a few days in a row. That would really f* with us.

Most of the costs of upgrading baggage screening are one time costs. They'll also be offest by not having to do 100% positive bag match, which the airlines claimed would be impossible and super expensive (though that prediction didn't seem to come true). There might even be some savings in the way of redesigning the baggage system at some airports to make it more efficient, as a lot of airports are pretty old.

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