Think what you're saying, too, though. There's no way terrorists would be able to plan such a large-scale plot, build the devices, deploy them and board a significant portion of them onto planes, without being caught up and detected at some point in the process.

Assuming there is a RF-based threat--which I'm dubious of, but for the sake of argument we'll assume is valid--there's still the problem of getting it onto enough planes to cause enough failures to make it worthwhile to terrorists. Our intelligence infrastructure may deserve some criticism, but I am fairly certain they would catch on to a plot which would require terrorists make 500 flights with RF devices to be effective. (And--making the reasonable assumption that such a device would be far short of 100% effective--surely pilots would start making reports of weird interference on the planes which weren't crashed--and thus would really tip off authorities to the potential problem).

It's just not a viable scenario.


I've had a small folding knife (3.5" blade) pass through security multiple times this year alone. (I had not realized it was in my laptop bag until after having gone through at least three TSA checkpoints with it--with not a single one even triggering a bag check!) A friend of mine had a much larger folding knife (a 6" blade) pass through several checkpoints as well in 2002.

So no, I don't have much faith the TSA, in their squinting at the x-rays to try to spot caps on bottles and the like, would catch box cutters very often, even today.


I mostly agree... although to play devil's advocate, I suspect a series of "unexplained" crashes would go a long way toward creating general panic and terror and thus might serve the terrorists' goals just the same.