If the media reports are accurate, another attempted terrorist attack on an aeroplane failed when the would-be mass-murderer managed nothing more lethal than setting fire to himself, leaving the 289 passengers and crew on flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit unharmed. 

The world breaths a sigh of relief and anyone flying in the next few weeks looks forward to more security checks and delays.

As the only person injured in this attack would seem to be the attacker, 23 year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, what lessons can we draw?

Carrying out a successful terrorist attack, especially on an aeroplane, would seem to be a lot harder than we might think (alternatively, terrorists are a lot dumber than we think – or perhaps both).

Security

The key security enhancement after 9/11 was preventing terrorists taking control of a plane’s cockpit. That, along with sensible security screening and decent intelligence, has resulted in no successful terrorist attacks on aircraft in over eight years.

On the other hand, protecting against specific threats doesn’t seem to make much difference. A failed shoe-bomber is arrested and everyone has to remove their shoes at check-in. A possible plot involving liquid explosives is foiled and no-one’s allowed to carry liquids on board.

As Abdulmutallab smuggled the explosives onto the plane in his underpants, will we now have scenes reminiscent of Viz’s Bottom Inspectors at airport security? Will there be a fast lane for those going commando?

Checking for the specific threat may make some sense in the short term (to foil multiple and copycat attacks), but does little good beyond that – the terrorists simply vary their tactics.

Intelligence

We don’t know how many plots have been foiled through good intelligence.  Probably not as many as the secrity services would like us to think, but certainly more than have been foiled by checking shoes and banning liquids from planes.

In this case, it seems Abdulmutallab had appeared on the security services’ radar but not made it onto a no-fly list.

I’ve no doubt the services in question will come in for criticism over this – surely they should have said better safe than sorry? Why take the risk?

Such criticism would be unfair. A no-fly list can only work if it’s kept small. Each year, millions of non-terrorists fly. If only a fraction of one percent of those are wrongly identified as terrorists, security will spend huge amounts of time dealing with angry, innocent customers and the whole list will fall into disrepute.

A no-fly list with half a million names on it (the size of the list Abdulmutallab was on, we’re told) would surely contain pretty much every common name around. Even with supplementary information, the number of false positives would be huge and time spent checking innocent passengers is time not being spent stopping the real terrorists.

Good news

The good news is that, in the West at least, the terrorists are losing. Successful terrorist attacks are very rare and, it would appear, difficult to pull off even with money and training.

That’s no reason to let our guard down; but perhaps its time to have another look at what does and doesn’t actually work in stopping the terrorists, focussing resources on what does and doing less of what doesn’t.