Aviation is so incredibly safe because of the attitude that "1 in 1 million" happens far too often to be left to chance.

That being said, aviation is a "just culture" so given that this failure meant that no-one was actually harmed and all that happened was a 12 year old kid flew to Rome (and back to London again) without a ticket. So they'll analyse what went wrong and then make a procedure to prevent it from happening again. No one will even get fired (doubly so as it takes so long for someone to get security clearance to work at an airport in the UK). However everyone will know it's Frank's fault they're having to sit through another safety procedure briefing, Frank will be living this down for a while.

Erm.. the guy is a kid of 12 or 13... he didn't socially engineer or study anything. He tailgated someone through the two areas where you check your boarding pass (an automated gate before security where you scan your boarding pass and at the gate itself which is the first place they actually check your ID and boarding pass).

This happened because normal people are too polite and kind to interrogate every kid who passes through.

From your utter butchering of the Kings English, you're clearly an American. Jokes aside, you should travel outside the US and find out that airports outside the US are not as bad as they are inside the US. Hence you get all the way to the gate before someone checks both your boarding pass and ID... and the ID is often optional when taking a domestic or intra-EU flight.

The airline is ultimately responsible for letting him on. Border Force (security) are responsible for safety (dangerous and illegal items), the airport is responsible for non-security equipment working (belts, gates, et al.) but it's the airline who decides who gets onto a plane or not.

I see you've never travelled outside the US... it's better almost everywhere else.

The fact this happened means that it's better in the UK. As a frequent traveller out of LHR (London Heathrow international airport) I can see exactly how this happened and also understand it's not common.

First of all, you're conflating the responsibility of the various parties involved. Border Force is not tasked with ensuring the passenger is ticketed, their job is handling the security infrastructure and ensuring passengers don't have any dangerous goods or illegal items. The airlines are ultimately responsible for letting people on the plane, so they're the ones to blame here, not security or the airport.

Allow me to explain how it typically goes down when flying from Heathrow.

1. Arrive for my international flight 2 hours ahead of the scheduled take off time.
2. Check in to the automated check-in machines (if you have not already checked in online) and tag my bag.
3. Drop my bag off at the allotted desk.
4. Head to security.
4.1. Join the queue to enter the autmated gates, its never a long queue. Scan my boarding pass and the gates open.
4.2. Listen to the friendly Heathrow queue fuhrer who'll direct you to the shortest security line (seriously, they do a fantastic job of balancing the lines so no-one gets stuck in a 50 mile long queue, unlike say on the M25 just outside Heathrow).
4.3. Listen to the friendly Border Force crier who tells you what you need to take out, take off or keep in your bag (electronics and liquids can stay now, the LAG restrictions are also gone from most UK airports).
4.4. Join the queue for the rapey-scanner. It's never more than 2 or 3 people.
4.5. Enter the rapey-scanner when directed, put your arms above your head and legs akimbo like you're about to start strutting your funky stuff.
4.6. Collect your bag off the X-ray scanner after flighting your way past the belt lice who's bags went in after yours.
5. Get airside and realise that the entirety of the above took less than 30 mins and wonder what the fuck you're going to do with yourself for the next hour (but you know if you arrived with just 1 hour to go something would have gone wrong, it's sods law of airports).
6. After wasting time and paying a kings ransom for a drink in WH Smith's head to your gate and join a queue of complete fucktards who can't follow a simple instruction like "boarding group 3 only, if you're not in boarding group 3 please remain seated" who are also trying to carry on 6 tonnes of luggage.
7. BA have finally started turning away people who are not in the correct boarding group so when you eventually get to the front of the line, this is the first person who actually checks both your boarding pass and ID to ensure that you are the passenger you say you are.
8. Fight for the overhead bin space as every fucktard brings more luggage than they are permitted.
9. When the doors are finally shut, prepare for the 20-30 min wait on the Heathrow taxiway because some wombles have been blocking the construction of the third runway for 30 years because they're cockwombles
10. Sit back, relax and shut up. It's a long way to Canada.

Most countries have dispensed with most of the US instantiated security theatre. Hell, the worst part of airports outside the US (and even mostly inside the US) are dealing with other passengers. Automation has made the process of going through an airport even easier than it was in the 90s before the US lost it's shit and decided everyone else had to as well.

Now it's easy to understand how this occurred because the "man" in question was actually a boy of 12 of 13 depending on which article you believe and they know how he did it... He tailgated someone else through the automated gates and boarding process. Border Force had nothing to do with it and the Heathrow staff will just end up with another safety briefing as it wasn't reasonable or prudent for them to stop and interrogate a kid. As mentioned above, it's the gate agents who work for the airlines who will bear responsibility and even then, aviation works on a principle of "just culture" which encourages people to be honest about mistakes rather than blaming them making them so they won't have anything lumped on them apart from perhaps a new procedure.

I'm getting shades of Colonel Kurtz from that... But won't let them write "fuck" on their aeroplanes because it's obscene.

Yes, it comes right after the begging stage "pleeeeeeeeaaaase just work".

I have the strangest feeling that this might be a case of McDonnell Douglas buying Boeing with Boeing's own money. Google bailing out Trump's failing Social Media business with a non-profitable business of their own.

I'll just stick to the quarter colon.

The US decided that it wasn't going to be smart or sensible after they defended Sandy Hook by supporting the likes of Alex Jones and Charlie Kirk (who ironically said we have to accept a number of shooting deaths). I have to wonder how bad things will get before people finally wake up. I suspect a lot worse.

This kind of thing isn't something you hear of in other parts of the world, even parts with relatively lax gun laws. I've not seen the headline "CERN scientist shot in his home" and that's in the middle of 2 counties with a fair few guns (Switzerland in particular, given their high gun ownership and love of sport shooting, yet they don't seem to have the same problems as the US with gun violence), nor Australia and New Zealand which also have relatively high gun ownership rates.

It might not even have been a targeted attack, it could have been just a burglary gone wrong. Something I'm glad I don't have to worry about, if I came downstairs to find a pair of scrotes lifting my TV I'd not worry. I'd just tell them to take the TV and get the fuck out knowing the worst they'll be carrying is a kinfe... meaning they'll have to get up close and personal the problem with which is that crims are usually cowards. They'll be more scared of me than I am of them (OK, I'm a Krav practitioner, so I'm too stupid to be sensibly scared), so scared chances are they'll forget to take the TV.

Yep, PC hardware might have had a bad november in the US but not because people are losing interest in PC gaming, people are losing interest in Console gaming which is to say, people are realising they're being nickel and dime'd for console gaming and have had enough now that consoles are approaching the price of entry level gaming PCs without half the features and all of the downsides.

PC hardware will take a hit for one simple reason. RAM prices (due to the AI bubble).

Also remember that we're due for some big releases soon, the Steam Machine in Feb (I think) and there's bound to be a new Nvidia generation out soon.

Finally, there is an economic downturn in the US... This means people start belt tightening and deferring a lot of purchases they don't need. A new console or laptop is one of said purchases, you can't eat an Xbox.

Erm... that was the point. Hence I referred to the "name" Reading.

Someone who was not native to the UK wouldn't know unless someone told them that Reading was pronounced differently to reading.

Yep, so-called reporter says complete bollocks to get eyeballs on ad laden article.

There are lies, damned lies and reporter suggestions.

Yep, if spelling is the worst they can get him for he has to be doing a decent job.

Worcestershire isn't even that bad once you sit down and actually look at it, it's just long. Leicester is far more confusing and then we have names that are spelled like common English words but are pronounced differently like Reading.

Granted we don't horribly mispronounce words like "solder" (it's "sole-der" not "sod-her", there's an L in it and don't even get me started on Jaguar) however there's a whole swath of words in English that are not pronounced the way you think, Sean Bean for example. there's at least 7 ways to pronounce the "ough" sound. Hell, just try to pronounce a lot of English place names like Bicester, Leicester or Worcestershire let alone the sizable London commuter town of Reading (for the uninitiated, it's pronounced redding, as in Otis, not "reading" as in what you do with a book).

English is a mongrel (and mutated) language, formed from proto-German and proto-French with spatterings of Latin and Greek hundreds of years ago and we've been adding new words from other languages ever since. T|he English language doesn't just borrow words from other languages, it chases them into alleys, beats them down and rifles through it's pockets for new vocabulary.

Spanish is far closer to a language that pronounces things the way they're spelled and even they have huge, glaring exceptions.

DEI is the great satan now.

We're getting closer to the truth though, DEI is just a few steps from admitting that the reason they really don't like them is because they're not white and not male.