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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.
From where you think they got this "exploding electronic" idea, humm?
A colleague of mine was **adamant** that because he could quantify the amount of harm Bush had done to the country in terms of lost troops, money, etc. and could not do the same with Obama (Arab Spring, Benghazi, etc.) that Obama was simply not in the same league. My response was that Obama was actually worse because while Bush weakened the old order that kept a lid on the extremists in the name of spreading dumbocracy in the Middle East, he didn't help overturn regimes like the Mubarak or Gaddafi regimes which kept a lid on some serious, organized problems.
So now what we have is worse than a world where the problems can be quantified, we live in a disordered world in which people continue to derp about "free and open societies" with global travel, as their own elected leaders have all but played the role of the Joker (Ledger, not Leto) around the world, creating a fertile breeding ground for terrorism and organized, dangerous extremist movements. The terrorists didn't so much as win over the last sixteen years as they didn't lose.
The most rational policy at this point would be to break up the foreign enclaves in the West, deport all of the recent arrivals (like last 20 years) and set up a policy of aid in the form of both financing for repair in countries like Syria and direct military assistance to the damaged states to help them stamp out the Islamist uprisings quickly, brutally and with as little collateral damage to non-combatants as possible. If we would just take the kid gloves off the US Army and MC and let Mattis channel his inner Patton against ISIS, we could probably bring peace to Syria in six months.
Let's assume this is a real threat And obviously it is doable, you could open up an ipod, rip out the guts, and put other stuff in its place. Why just 8 countries then? If its a real threat, its a global threat. Its not all that hard for someone to fly to another country first and then travel from an allowed airport. If this is a real threat, it should be from all airports. Otherwise its just games.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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'
was the discovery of a plot
if every time someones discovered plotting the demise of western civilization we are to enact some new pointless and myopic law for our airlines, we may as well scrap the whole idea of commercial flight. Someone could easily roll a grenade into the screening area, or the food court, or even the ticket counter and accomplish just as much if not even more than an i-pad bomb. or they could show up at a gay nightclub and kill 60 people. or shoot up a government building in San Bernadino.
Los Angeles International even had a guy show up with a high power rifle and start picking off cops and TSA agents, which went way beyond a plot, but we still dutifully strip off our shoes and throw out our bottled water in homage to the all mighty security theatre. The point of terrorism is that once you concede to being terrorized, thats it, youve lost whatever war you thought you were fighting against it.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
If this ban had been in place in place when a Samsung Note 7 caught fire in an airplane cabin the result would have been more serious. Instead of being quickly caught and dealt with as the phone battery overheated in his hand while still on ground, it is possible that it would have smoldered undetected in the middle of the cargo hold until turning into a serious conflagration in-flight. A ban like this will increase the risk of in-flight battery fires and make flying less safe.
So please explain how a pilot fell out of the window of the cockpit after it broke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The window is not underneath him http://www.bac1-11jet.co.uk/N9...
While extremely entertaining, Mythbusters are pretty bad in using Google and I would never use them as an example of why things are not possible, only to say if they are possible. (Bit like a ping doesn't say much when you don't get anything back)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
More relevant to me, that's a pretty big hole in the plane
1 person dead, the make a hole and suck people out strategy is not very effective. Probably why it hasn't been tried.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
On a Somali flight (Daallo Airlines Flight 159). A laptop full of explosives was smuggled aboard a flight and detonated against the airplane's hull, blowing a hole in it. The only fatality was the bomber, who was sucked out the hole.
The issue was that, in order to get this laptop around checked bag security in Mogadishu (which isn't too good, but enough so that the terrorists didn't risk carrying it through), they had to have an airport employee carry it in and hand it to the passenger. Now if this is what the USA and GB are worried about, we have a really big problem. If an airport employee can sneak in a laptop, they can sneak in anything up to the allowed carry-on size. It doesn't have to be electronics. It could be a hollowed out bible or koran. The only way to protect against this kind of threat would be to shut down all flights originating at or passing through an airport suspected of being compromised.
Have gnu, will travel.
Too much Hollywood. I can't be the only person on /. that remembers Aloha Air 243
You're not going to get a large enough explosion out of a device the size of an iPad that's going to blow any where near the 1/3 of the top off of a 737 like there was in that case. That flight was at 24k feet. The only person who was "sucked out" of the plane was a flight attendant who I believe was standing under the part that came off of the plane. There were injuries, but the plane landed. While the pressure is certainly different at high altitude, it's not like these planes are flying in the vacuum of space.
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.
It's a good thing Terrorists don't know about connecting flights, otherwise instead of taking a flight direct from a banned city to the USA, they'd take their iPad on a flight that connects through a non-banned city, perhaps even transferring from a Middle Eastern airline to a Western airline so they punish even more westerners.
Which is the same problem the USA has with domestic flights -- an attacker doesn't have to breach security at a large airport, they just need to bribe some random TSA worker in any of thousands of small airports to smuggle a box full of "drugs" that's really the explosive or weapon he wants. The person doing the smuggling doesn't even need to be in on it, they can think they are a well paid drug mule while they deliver a box of explosives to someone at JFK.
airliners are built to be dirt cheap
Dirt cheap? Seriously? How much gold is there in your dirt?
Aviation in general is ridiculously expensive. Large airliners go into the hundreds of millions, which make them about 100 times more expensive than cars, pound for pound. I work in the field and if there is a word that doesn't describe the industry, it's "cheap".
The reason flying is cheaper nowadays is not because planes are built cheaper. That's because they are more efficient and require less maintenance. Plus everything that is not directly related to the plane itself such as : cabin crew, airport fees, service, taxes, yield management, etc...
They all come from the factory with a bomb.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
They've been saying this for the best part of 20 years, and only now has it become a credible threat? Terrorists don't read the internet enough....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'