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Laptop Ban on Planes Came After Plot To Put Explosives in iPad (theguardian.com)
Last week, United States and United Kingdom officials announced new restrictions for airline passengers from eight Middle Eastern countries, forbidding passengers to carry electronics larger than a smartphone into an airplane cabin. Now The Guardian reports, citing a security source, the ban was prompted in part by a plot involving explosives hidden in a fake iPad. From the report: The security source said both bans were not the result of a single specific incident but a combination of factors. One of those, according to the source, was the discovery of a plot to bring down a plane with explosives hidden in a fake iPad that appeared as good as the real thing. Other details of the plot, such as the date, the country involved and the group behind it, remain secret. Discovery of the plot confirmed the fears of the intelligence agencies that Islamist groups had found a novel way to smuggle explosives into the cabin area in carry-on luggage after failed attempts with shoe bombs and explosives hidden in underwear. An explosion in a cabin (where a terrorist can position the explosive against a door or window) can have much more impact than one in the hold (where the terrorist has no control over the position of the explosive, which could be in the middle of luggage, away from the skin of the aircraft), given passengers and crew could be sucked out of any subsequent hole.
This myth was busted on Mythbusters' first season. You can *fall* out of an airplane that has had major structural failure, but you aren't going to get sucked out of your seat unless the opening is literally underneath you (and large enough).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm not an explosives expert, but maybe someone who is can comment on the plausibility of this? It seems like an ipad or laptop couldn't carry enough explosives to take the plane down.
You don't need to take the plane down, causing enough damage will suffice (think sudden decompression).
That said, I call bullshit on this one. At least here ("Large European City", second airport in the country traffic wise) they always ask you to power on notebooks, tablets and even cameras to verify that they're real. Heck, I even had to turn on my camera and let the man wave his hand in front of it to check that it was actually his own hand showing on the display! ;-)
RT.
Witness BitZtream getting totally pwned!
That wasn't the myth they were testing. As other people have pointed out, people can and have been sucked out of airplanes. As I recall, the episode you're talking about even mentioned that fact.
What they were testing was that a bullet hole in a plane could lead to "explosive decompression" and cause a large hole to suck people out. Specifically the myth that a terrorist with a gun shoots a hole in a window and that causes a large hole that people get sucked out of. And they determined that such a scenario just wouldn't work: airplane glass won't fracture like that, and the hole the bullet creates wouldn't be large enough to cause enough suction to suck people out.
But they never tested anything like an exploding iPad or laptop. They were specifically testing shooting holes in a plane with a gun.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Mythbusters tested a small bullet hole in a pressurized fuselage. The thing about pressure is it's a force per unit of area. So the larger the opening, the larger the forces involved (until the pressure is equalized). So something as small as a bullet hole doesn't result in large forces.
Aloha Airlines flight 243 lost the forward section of its fuselage. The flight attendant standing in row 2 near the front of the failed section was hit in the head by debris and fell to the floor. The flight attendant standing in row 5 near the rear of the failed section, with all the force of the cabin air behind her, was blown out by the decompression.
Airline fuselages are designed to suffer decompression only in a small section. You literally design weak sections surrounded by a lattice of strong sections, so a crack or failure cannot unzip the skin around the entire plane as it did in Aloha 243. The failure aboard Aloha is suspected to have started on the left side (one of the passengers noticed a crack by the door while boarding). And the theory is the crack failed producing a small hole. The flight attendant was blown towards the hole by outrushing air, and her body momentarily plugged the initial hole. This caused a pressure hammer from the air behind her rushing forward towards that hole blew out the entire forward cabin overhead.
This ban has NOTHING to do with what logo is painted on the aircraft, but depends entirely on the airports involved.
Flying from Paris to Chicago? Middle-Eastern and American airlines have the same rules -- electronics allowed, even on a Middle-Eastern airline. Flying from Istanbul to New York? Once again, same rules for Middle-Eastern and American airlines -- no electronics, even on the American airline.
So, explain to me how this is supposed to prefer one airline over another? I am really waiting to hear this one.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."