> After each crash, disaster or terrorist episode, it is natural to point fingers and say, Why didn’t we foresee that specific threat? Thus one attempted shoe bombing leads to a decade of shoes-off orders in security lines. The truth is that air transportation, like most other modern systems, could not operate if it fortified itself against every conceivable peril.
Many people like to use phrases like "one $INCIDENT is one too many". In reality, all of life is about balancing and mitigating risks. Just because a single failure happened in one case doesn't mean the entire system is faulty; given enough time, any system that is not 100% foolproof (that is, all of them) is going to have a failure. The question is whether it is actually feasible and/or reasonable to prevent those.