Reply #47: you are much more likely to destroy the plane w/ no survivors over water [View All]

think about it

Video of the crashes would be nice from a terrorists point of view, but I recall the TWA 800 floating wreckage, especially the burning floating piecesand the obvious TWA logos as pretty memorable.

What they really want to do is crash the planes, cause global fear, and ground the airline system worldwide casuing maximum damage. Crashing 9 or 10 planes at the same time would do that. Who would want to fly after that?

If you have the bombs go off midway across the ocean, you put the planes at their maximum distance from an emergency landing if you only managed to damage a plane. The longer a damaged plane is in the air, it gives any surviving terrorists more time to do more damage, or to actually let the plane fail catastrophically. They were going to use TATP. TATP violently expands as it detonates. In a pressurized airplane at 37,000 feet, overpressure in a plane could really do substantial damage via explosive decompression. Could they go for trying to detonate the planes over NYC or DC or Chicago at 5-10,000 feet? Of course, but they have a greater chane of bringing down the plane from a high altitude than at a low altitude.

And forget about a water landing? Did you ever see the footage of the hijacked Ethiopian airplane making a water landing/crash?