I’d like to know what they got out of the guy before he lawyered up. There seems to be an assumption that he waited until the end of the flight in the hope that he would scatter airplane parts and jet fuel (not that there would be that much at the end of a flight) over the southeast Michigan landscape, or perhaps the airport itself. Call it the poor man’s hijacking. I assume that this is the thinking (to use a generous word) behind the rule about sitting with an empty lap for the last hour of flight.
But the chances of a bomb taking down an aircraft by blowing a hole in the fuselage are much higher when it’s at altitude, and more likely to pop like a balloon. Even if it had worked as designed (again, to use a generous word) it might not have brought down the plane at the lower altitude.
What if the lateness of the attempt was just that it took him that long to work up the gumption to do the deed? He had the whole flight to think about it, and it was almost over, and he finally realized that if he was going to do it, he had to do it now, and procrastination time was over? If so, it’s just one more reason to think the new rules imbecilic.
Maybe he thought that if he waited until the plane was on approach near a big city he could kill people on the ground in addition to those on the plane?
Of course, that assumes he was *thinking*.
Mmmm…a technical point: blowing a hole in the plane at altitude wouldn’t make it “pop like a balloon.” It’s a nastier situation at altitude because the dynamic pressure (qbar) is roughly 2-3 times what it is during terminal area operations and the loads are directly proportional to qbar, and because the flowfield disturbances over the fuselage, wing, and control surfaces may be greater due to Mach effects. There have been much worse things happen where the plane still got back OK, e.g. the 737 forward fuselage separation accident and the first (1972) DC-10 cargo bay door accident, also in Detroit by coincidence. But this one would have been dicey by any measure.
There’s also the fact that his chosen method of carrying his explosives wouldn’t require him to stand up at any point, let alone at the end of the flight.
The TSA is honestly probably more trouble than it’s worth at this point.
…blowing a hole in the plane at altitude wouldn’t make it “pop like a balloon.”
I was exaggerating to make the point.
I’d also like to know what they found out, but I wouldn’t want our enemies to know that and I wouldn’t want the authorities to waste their time determining that I myself am not one of our enemies or someone who would let the information get out … So I’ll reconcile myself to not knowing.
I assumed he waited so there would be eyewitnesses to the resulting crash (and I would think if the bomb went off late enough there wouldn’t be enough time for the pilots to recover and land safely).
What if he had tied to set it off wher he could not bee seen? Ban the Lavatory next?
Perhaps we can engineer the head to direct the blast ourside like the blow-out bustle on an M1 Tank.
I still want to know how he failed to make PETN explode. Don’t they call that stuff Mother of Satan?
You are thinking of somethign else. PETN is a commercial grade explosive. I used to regulate blasting on strip mines and Non-Electric Shock Cord is lined with PETN IIRC.
Lead Azide mabey? A Fly landing on that stuff could set if off.
I’m thinking of the homemade explosive used primarily by Arab or Palestinian bomb-makers, that has a reputation of blowing them up on not-infrequent occasions… I *thought* that was PETN, but I could certainly be confusing my explosives.
And, sure enough, that was it; TATP is “Mother of Satan”; I got confused by a reference to the shoe bomber, who apparently was trying to use a TATP fuse to set off PETN.
Note that the final diagnosis on the 747 that went down off Long Island was of fumes in a mostly-empty main tank being set off by an electrical problem. (Ignited fumes in a mostly-empty fuel tank was also the likely cause of a number of other crashes over the years.)
Reports are that the underpants bomber was seated directly over the main center tank of the aircraft. Reports seem to indicate that detonating 80 gm of PETN in an airliner will definitely punch holes in the hull nearby, but won’t certainly of itself bring the plane down. Punching a hole in a mostly-empty main fuel tank and igniting the fumes there however very probably will bring down an airliner.
One might assume all the timing needed for that plan is a watch. The new last-hour-of-flight and nav-info restrictions still make no sense unless the intent was to bring the plane down in a specific area. We will no doubt eventually see.
The new last-hour-of-flight and nav-info restrictions still make no sense unless the intent was to bring the plane down in a specific area.
And unless they next require all windows blinds be lowered, it won’t take much effort to figure out where the plane actually is.
Lowering the window blinds isn’t enough – they’ll also need to require that all passengers get so drunk (or otherwise anesthetized) they can’t feel when the descent begins or when the flaps and wheel go down.
Seriously, there seems a distinct shortage of willing suicide bombers who also have it together enough to get through a security line then competently set off a no-metal-parts bomb. Adding the ability to recognize terrain out an airliner window and correlate that to a map location is going to further reduce the available pool.
Come to think of it, the claims that there are many more such bombers ready to go in Yemen may be a bluff. Illiterate teenage tribesmen are likely the majority of the available pool, and such aren’t likely to be able to reliably get past security and onto the airplane in the first place.