Well, the increased security measures are starting to border on the ridiculous, the notion of having to check in your laptop and even the thought of going transcontinental without a book is just absurd. As I mentioned yesterday we adapt and improve, and we will, but it may well be that in the age of open source there is now a good chance of a fundamental restructure of business travel where the use of small jets or shared leases by a group of companies has good potential to replace the ubiquitous struggle to get on a big ticket commercial airliner.

Business travel has always been somewhat over the top in my opinion, I recall a Hong Kong to Washington, DC, flight where I had to attend a morning meeting that could well have been conducted by way of a conference call. The trip had entertainment value as I got to spent an extra day taking in the DC sights, but the cost-benefit ratio was totally off the charts. And that was in 1999, now with even better, faster and cheaper communication tools at hand there is a compelling argument to improve the bottom line by reducing corporate trips. And post-jihad travel will probably add another signifcant cost by adding longer waiting times at check-in and reducing efficiency if you can no longer use your laptop in the cabin. Not to mention that other cost-benefit analysis where the upside of closing a new deal will have to be weighed against the probability of being blown to smithereens by the jihadist sitting next to you in 5C.

In all seriousness, in an age where we move to smaller, independent and often non-corporate solutions – there’s a guy who wrote a book about that - we may well enter an age where small private jets will no longer be the provenance of the rich and famous. Creative financiers and risk takers will no doubt find a model whereby business travel can increasingly be channeled through small operators that operate light jets and who can offer their clients tailored flight plans. Too bad that Airbus failed to figure that out:

NOTE: Innovation is not something we're going to get out of large airline companies. But rather than confiscating books, cellphones and bottled water they may want to give it a try and consider alternative approaches:

Rafi Ron, former head of security at Tel Aviv, Israel's Ben Gurion Airport, said screeners should focus more on finding suspicious people than on hunting for potential terrorist tools.

"It is extremely difficult for people to disguise the fact they are under tremendous amount of stress, that they are going to kill themselves and a lot of people around them in a short amount of time, and all the other factors that effect their behavior," Ron said.

Makes sense, doesn't it?