An actuary is a person who produces probability tables which determine the likelihood of a potential future event, normally for insurance companies. Say for example a young man comes along and asks for a million dollars worth of insurance because he wants to fly his untried home made jet aircraft under the Brooklyn Bridge at Mach 2. No problems, sensing a quick kill the actuary would probably calculate a 99.9% probability of a fatal outcome and suggest an insurance premium of 1.2 million dollars payable cash in advance, which should cover the young man's funeral, and the actuary's corporate expenses with change.
However, task the same actuary with assessing the probability of a major airliport terminal collapsing and it would be a very different matter, or at least it would have been before the sudden collapse of the first dedicated Airbus A 380 Super Jumbo terminal at Paris Charles de Gaulle. Up until that point in time no major airport terminals had collapsed anywhere in the world, making them extremely profitable items to insure, i.e. constant providers of moderate cash flow for investors in the form of insurance premiums, at almost zero risk of insurance payout. Marvellous, just what the banker ordered...
Now imagine yourself as the actuary tasked with insuring ten more dedicated A 380 airport terminals, when two out of the only four nearing completion anywhere in the world had already collapsed. All of a sudden your world has been turned upside down, and your probability tables no longer have any meaning. Although these terminals are only two out of about 10,000 world wide [a risk of one in five thousand], they represent fifty percent of the dedicated A 380 terminals, suddenly dramatically shortening the odds of catastrophic loss to a staggering risk of one in two, if you dare to insure any airport terminal with the name "Airbus" attached to it.
By now you will have got the picture. The overall probability of two out of the only four A 380 terminals in the world spontaneously collapsing by accident still has to be based on the estimated total of 10,000 airport terminals world wide, leading any actuary to believe instantly that the collapses were in all probability not accidents at all.
Next there is the "rate" to be taken into account, meaning the frequency of such events per year or per month, depending on your chosen calculations. Let us assume that before the Paris Charles de Gaulle collapse on 23 May 2004, not one of the 10,000 airport terminals world wide had collapsed, meaning that you have 10,000 x 40 terminal/year units free of liability. Put simply, before 23 May 2004 you had 400,000 superb income-generating accident-free terminal/year units of unhindered investor revenue.
Then, as if out of nowhere, you get two accidents not only within a single year, but within half of a single year. How? The fact that both of these' accidents' [the only two in forty years...] are linked to the same single controversial airplane, sends the probability of deliberate sabotage rocketing sky high. In fact, so high that my calculator ran out of zeroes.
Coming shortly: "America May Be Forced To Surrender in Iraq"