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"Someone wrote that when there's an airline accident, the FAA finds out exactly went wrong and institutes rules to make sure that it never happens again. This makes great sense when you have a highly reliable system and your (rare) problems have non-malicious causes. Air travel is so safe that finding potential accidents is really hard.
"This gives a possible explanation of why the TSA airline regulations are so boneheaded. It's not so much that the people who devise them are stupid, it's that they're stuck in the wrong mental model: accident prevention rather than counterterrorism."
-- Jeremiah Blatz, 2007-02-22
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There must be some context I'm missing here, since there is no way _any_ airline safety organisation should be prioritising counterterrorism over incident prevention. Just in terms of risk analysis alone, that makes no goddam sense. Terrorism is a loud, infrequent risk, whereas incidents (of any sort, up to and including crashes, which are by no means the only risk going) are an everyday risk.
(Great comment a couple below that quoted one, about the UK having liquid bombers and the US getting bans on liquids -- yeah, liquid bombers who didn't even have passports, let alone airline tickets, who hadn't gotten any of the materials in question, let alone demonstrated in testing that their planned formulation would cause an explosion, never mind getting on a plane with it... Is there any level to which people who find it convenient to spend their lives afraid of terrorism will not sink? And they talk about political motivations?! Spare me...)
I will agree that applying an incident-analysis model to a law enforcement problem is probably the wrong approach; on the other hand, systems safety should take care of even risks posed by agents (as opposed to systemic flaws), since if you have a well-designed system that actually works, the possibility of any particular agent or factor being able to subvert that system is lessened. I don't believe that there is such a thing as a perfect system, and I'm pretty much a subscriber to Perrow's "Normal Accident Theory," despite his being so terribly, terribly wrong about Y2K (although he was not wrong in seeing it as a technological mishap with a very complex set of antecedents), so I don't think that you can entirely prevent either aircraft incidents or terrorism. Designing a better airline safety system would mitigate some of the risk, though.