I think godelski is being far too permissive in his odds. As he says, we need to examine how (un)likely is it that somebody is trying to execute this terrorist action, including being competent enough to create a workable bomb, to sneak it through security, and so forth. That's all his numbers show.
But we've also got to factor in
A) How likely is it that this bomb is going to have some bluetooth component? It seems like needless complexity, so we should weigh strongly against this. Further, it's less likely that our hypothetical terrorist needs to have expertise in this domain as well.
B) How likely is it that he would clearly paint the word "BOMB" on the side of his device (figuratively, of course, since this is digital)? That's amazing levels of stupidity. And then intersect that with the claim that he's competent in all the other things (bomb making, sneaking through security, making a bluetooth trigger for his bomb) but is so incredibly stupid that he'd label it a bomb.
Factoring all of this in, godelski is being far too generous in assessing this with odds similar to finding the winning Powerball ticket outside the front door while simultaneously being hit by lightning.
I acknowledge that the airline captain has some responsibility for our security. But part of this responsibility is being a steward for our overall well-being. And in this case, the "security" aspect is so vastly overwhelmed by the damage it did to passengers in other ways, that it was obviously a bad call on the captain's part.
Oh for sure. I'm admittedly several orders of magnitude too conservative in the simple case. I'll be honest, I expect that to be several orders of magnitude conservative to reality, as you point out.
It's exactly why I'm telling people they are being crazy in this thread. Because people are still defending the "Free Palestine, F Israel" device name as if it's a threat. The supposed threat there is that this starts a fight on the plane. To which the obvious answer is to arrest the person that gets so irritated by a trivial to ignore protest that they decide to start a fight on a plane. Arresting the person making the tacky protest is crazy. The logic people are arguing for is "arrest an annoying person because their annoyance might cause a crazy person to act crazy". Why isn't the answer "arrest the crazy person?" This whole thread is batshit levels of insane