Packages of doom or overactive imaginations?
Sounds like it would be easier to get all passengers on a plane to pay attention to the safety speech than create a big enough explosion using liquids smuggled on in shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes. Too many people at HS watching Die Hard movies and not talking to chemists first who know better? Or perhaps it was a ploy to make people afraid before the election (take it away, conspiracy enthusiasts!).
Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?
We’re told that the suspects were planning to use TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, a high explosive that supposedly can be made from common household chemicals unlikely to be caught by airport screeners. [...] Or at least that’s what we’re hearing, and loudly, through the mainstream media and its legions of so-called “terrorism experts.” But what do these experts know about chemistry? [T]he myth of binary liquid explosives dies hard.
Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you’ll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you’ll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.
After a few hours – assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven’t overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities – you’ll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.
By now you’ll be asking why these jihadist wannabes didn’t conspire simply to bring TATP onto planes, colored with a bit of vegetable dye, and disguised as, say, a powdered fruit-flavored drink. The reason is that they would be afraid of failing: TATP is notoriously sensitive and unstable.
