![]() “ explosions are known to be about 80 percent as strong as TNT, but the substance is much harder to handle,” explained Laura Finney, a chemistry doctoral student at the University of Nottingham, in The Conversation in 2017. Still, couldn’t a potential attacker simply mix multiple bottles together in a larger container once airborne? Well, in theory, yes, but here’s the thing: liquid explosives are, sort of by definition, pretty unstable substances – and trying to mix them on board or in an airport bathroom might just blow up in your face. “The size of the container itself is part of the security measure.” “With certain explosives you need to have a certain critical diameter in order to achieve an explosion that will cause a certain amount of damage,” he explained. In fact, former director of the TSA Kip Hawley told the New York Times back in 2007, the size of the bottle is actually more important than the liquid inside. It’s a natural assumption, but, surprisingly, it’s wrong. Why can I take four 100ml bottles on an airplane but not one 400ml bottle?Īs justifiable as this limit on fluids originally was, if you’ve ever found yourself impatiently decanting a second or third tiny bottle of shampoo to store in your hand luggage, you’ve probably wondered the same thing: how come I can bring a bunch of small bottles on board, but not one larger bottle?Īfter all – couldn’t some potential terrorist just pack, say, four or five smaller amounts of liquid explosives, then detonate all of them? Surely it’s the total amount of liquid brought on board that matters, rather than the size and number of containers it’s in? Soon, the rest of the world followed suit – and within a few months, this new standard for air travel had spread pretty much around the globe. ![]() Luckily, the plan was intercepted before it ever went ahead – but had it been successful, experts reckoned that the “smuggled inside beverage containers” method would have left “little or no forensic evidence showing how they had done it.” Immediately, travelers out of the UK were banned from taking anything other than essential travel items as carry-on luggage, while in the US, virtually all liquids were forbidden.īefore long, however, both countries had instituted rules that allowed liquids in hand luggage so long as they were stored in bottles no larger than 100ml. While it wasn’t the first scheme aiming to bring down a plane in such a way – the Bojinka Plot of 1995 also used liquid explosives, and had it gone ahead would have resulted in the deaths of around 4,000 people including the Pope – it was the first since 9/11, in the newly-paranoid world of the War On Terror. ![]() From there, a trace amount of high explosive, contained inside an AA battery combined with a camera flash as detonator, would create an explosion big enough to blow through the fuselage of all of the seven planes targeted in the attack. ![]() Plotters carrying acetone peroxide, also known as TATP or ( genuinely) “Mother of Satan”, would board the aircraft, before injecting hydrogen peroxide into the bottles. Specifically, the plan was to involve liquid explosives brought onto planes disguised as soft drinks. “This was to be achieved by means of concealed explosive devices smuggled onto the aircraft in hand baggage,” he explained.
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