It feels like quite a while since I’ve posted! I attribute that mostly due to the holiday rush and a whole lot of traveling on my part. But, speaking of traveling, I wanted to talk about something I read on my plane ride back to Denver yesterday from the book Why We Make Mistakes by Joe Hallinan.

This book explores a lot of reasons why people miss important information or make wrong choices, etc., and one particularly interesting example was of the “error rate” of screeners in airports– as reported by the Transportation Security Administration.

A test back in 2002 indicated 1 in 4 guns were missed by airport screeners. That was confirmed in a study 2 years later at Newark’s airport at which the failure rate was also 25%. And in 2006, 60% of bomb materials and explosives hidden in carry-ons were missed at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The bomb test reported even worse in Los Angeles International Airport at a 75% failure rate!

Hallinan says that this looking-but-not-seeing issue is deeply human, to say that we typically don’t see things we are not expecting to see. And with about a one-in-a-million chance of seeing a gun go through security, it’s entirely predictable (though slightly unintuitive) that screeners would miss that one they just weren’t expecting to come across.

I once heard that teachers grading standardized tests are subjected to bogus essays every now and again to make sure they stay consistent. And I think that the TSA should do the same– slip in bogus dangers every now and again, maybe even a couple times a day, to keep them consistent. And possibly for some entertainment value!

I imagine that is how they came up with these figures in the first place, so I do hope that they already have a system like this in place. But I just wanted to share my thoughts and possibly stir up some ideas in your head as well!

“To err is human,” dangerous as it may be. Here’s to innovation to protect us from ourselves!