This research was submitted to us by an airport worker who prefers to stay anonymous.

I work the overnight shift for a company that does private jet charters and private jet management. Every night, it's my responsibility to check our next-day passengers against the TSA No-Fly List.

Normally, there is a computer program that does this, and then I simply check the results. But, if the program is down on any given night, then I have to manually go through the list, which takes quite a while. Last night was one of those nights.

FUN FACTS:

• I view the list in Microsoft Excel format. There are 9 full sheets, with each sheet containing 65,500 names, plus a 10th sheet that goes up to 34,420 names. That's a grand total of 623,920 names.
• Granted, many of these are multiple entries for one person: with alternate spellings & birthdates.
• I would guess that the list is 99.5% Islamic names. That is NOT an exaggeration, but a conservative estimate.
• The list is alphabetical by surname, but approximately 25% of the names begin with "Al_". (Lucky me, my first two passengers were named Albright and Alexander.)
• Before that, there are tens of thousands that begin with "Ab", "Ah", and "Ak", among others. After that, there are plenty more "Ali", "As", and "Az".
• All told, there are 266,503 surnames that begin with "A", which is 42.7% of the entire list.
• The "I" section is quite annoying to get through, with many thousands of instances of "Ibn", "Ibrahim", "Ismael", and "Issa" (each with various spellings).
• The "K" section is primarily composed of "Khan".
• Although "Muhammad" and its many different spellings are far more popular as given names than surnames, there are still many thousands of list entries where it is a surname.
• The letters "A" to "M" make up the first half of the English alphabet, but on the no-fly list they make up the first 80%.
• After that, we find countless entries for "Nasir", "Omar", and "Rahman".
  "S" takes up quite a lot of room, with "Sayid" (many spellings), "Shah-", "Sultan", and others.
• The final page is rounded out by countless entries for "Umar", "Walid", and "Yusuf" (many spellings).
  
  

• 23 entries for "Johnson"
• 37 for "Jones"
• 11 for "Miller"
• 55 for "Smith"
• 10 for "Williams"

In other words, these extremely common surnames make up 0.02% of the entire no-fly list. It's also worth noting that many of these have Islamic given names (e.g. Muhammad Smith, Ibrahim Jones, etc.). This would suggest converts who legally changed their given name but not their surname.

CONCLUSION:

The politically correct crowd says that profiling is unfair, and everyone is equally likely to be a terrorist. Anyone with half a brain should realize that this is complete nonsense. Of course, many people realize it, but make a conscious effort to deny it.

(Please note: the list is updated several times a week, but doesn't change drastically. The above statistics are accurate for the version of the list released on 24 November 2012.).