The Basis (Such as it is) for the War on Liquids
 

This story dates back to 2006 and apparently justifies the War on Water at America's airports. Personally, I'm having a hard time closing on the chemistry involved in the alleged "liquid bombs make airplanes fall from the skies" scenario. (Sorry about the large font size.)

I'm a long-in-the-tooth engineer, although not a chemical engineer or a chemist. I'm having a hard time conjecturing how the scenario described in the article could have reasonably led to a threat to civil aviation.

If someone else who is more experienced in this subject can weigh in with their opinion, I think most of us would be very interested. it won't do a thing for the War on Shampoo at America's airports but it might lend credibility to the science, or the lack there of....

Looking forward to the dialogue....

IIRC, the people who were trying to perpetrate this plot had never made a bomb and detonated it, so they'd not been given the opportunity to blow themselves up before getting on a plane. Further, most involved didn't even have passports according to many reports so the plot was not imminent.

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The plot was very well along - if not as far along as UK domestic security forces and the CPP preferred for ensuring guilty verdicts. But do not confuse not being as far along as the lawyers preferred with the plot not being viable and in action, let alone "imminent;" the problem of not having tickets could have been overcome in an hour or a day as specific flights had been selected/targeted. In fact, all of the bomb-makers and most of the conspirators admitted to the essence of the plot (if not admitting specifically to attack aircraft).

And the plan was viable; read this article by James Lewis, a former EOD officer: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/0...bomb_verdicts/

The plan was not viable, at least certainly not with those who were used as the basis for launching the "War on Liquids" at airport screening checkpoints.

The Guardian - Three guilty of transatlantic bomb plot

So, the people who came up with the idea were never able to assemble such a device, but Government scientists, presumable those with a knowledge of chemistry and/or bomb making, were able to to do so in a lab. That doesn't really demonstrate the viability of the plan.

The techniques these idiots were purported to be looking into may indeed be viable methods for creating explosives and detonators in a laboratory environment. But when assessing the viability of the plot, the real question is whether any of them had the requisite knowledge, skills, or experience to create, transport, smuggle, assemble, and detonate such devices in the real world.

More likely, they'd blow themselves to spaghetti sauce while attempting to create the chemicals, or while attempting to transport them. They might also get caught, delayed, or otherwise prevented from making the rendezvous with the others, resulting in an incomplete and useless device.

These days, they'd just smuggle the explosives and detonators in palettes of Deer Park and Coke Zero bound for the local Hudson News.

That would have been Alford, paid by the Brits, who, IIRC, talked about the instability of the bomb in one of the videos that I saw.

If a state sponsored (funded) group wanted to attack commercial aviation I have little doubt they would have a high probability of being successful. The employee backdoor to airports is still wide open since TSA refuses to address that glaring oversight. The question has to be to what goal would this act be. Just placing a bomb on a plane has impact but nothing like hijacking several airplanes using them as guided missiles as happened on 9/11/2001. Unless the cockpit door is breach violence in the cabin will have little impact on the whole of flying. And I think that takes us to the issue of LGA's being bombs. Would the pilot surrender his aircraft if a threat of a bomb was made in flight? I would hope not. Are liquid bombs stable enough to carry on board and then make ready for use? I think TSA jumped the shark on this matter and have made flying more restricted than needed to address the issue. If Fonzi hadn't been the first to jump the shark I suspect TSA would have taken that honor.

"Viable," to me, means that the technical aspects of the plan were possible, however unlikely to succeed. Of course, prior to reading Tom Clancy's fiction and 9/11, did you think, as did most everybody else, that using a commercial airliner as a missile was not a "viable" plan?

From your comments, is it possible that you did not actually read The Register article? It was proven at trial the the people who came up with the plan had actually assembled (and tested) similar devices and that the bomb-makers were not only trained (by the aforementioned planners) in making the specific type of devices and had obtained the needed chemicals but in were in the process of concentrating the peroxide and assembling the devices; in addition to the physical evidence of these facts the accused actually admitted to all of this.

So, yes, the plan was viable not only as an idea but also as an actual operation. And even though it had extremely small chance of being successful because it had not only been detected but was under tremendous surveillance the entire time, that didn't make it any less viable.

Smuggling WEI in pallets of material destined for Hudson News or most other vendors has a very low possibility of succeeding as all of that material is inspected several ways before being admitted into the other areas of the airport. Generally, this is done not by TSOs but by airport-operator provided security/contractor staff.

A more successful avenue to bring it in would be in bulk construction materials (such as concrete, fill dirt, gravel, etc.) or in large equipment - but that would also be low probability due to the security procedures for that material and the challenges in getting it near an airplane. Much higher probability is to coerce or outright pay an airport employee to smuggle it in. And while that is the weakest link as not all employees at all airports are screened each and every time entering the SIDA - there is a tremendous amount of effort and activity that goes into preventing such a thing.

I appreciate that you say a "tremendous amount of effort and activity" in preventing employee introduced WEI. While I appreciate the statement my personal observations suggest otherwise. Sitting for a short period of time I observed an employee entrance. I couldn't see the card reader but the door never closed so piggy backing may have occurred. I also observed employees bringing in multiple 2 liter bottles of what appeared to be cola, a roll aboard suitcase, backpacks, and other assorted items. None of which were inspected.

In my opinion that is not security!

Kip Hawley, former head of TSA, has come out and said that the War on Water should have been ended on his watch - he was just too lazy to make it happen. He didn't go into details, possibly because it was SSI.

Knowing something about explosives, having been paid to play with explosives in a professional sense in the past, I'd disagree on the plan being viable. To me, viable means being able to assemble and place the explosives and have them have a reasonable chance of detonation at the desired time.

The plot, as described, does not feature those attributes IMO. They are far (far!) more likely to have blown themselves up prematurely while trying to assemble the final device - basically, a squib detonation that would likely only burn (maybe kill, if they were unlucky (or lucky, depending on perspective)) them and do minimal damage otherwise. In the context of a plane, still potentially dangerous, but no more so than the idiot shoe or undies bombers. If they tried to assemble it airside in the sterile area then no real threat at all.

I would strongly suggest you never go into the field of risk assessment if that's your definition of "viable".

High purity hydrogen peroxide is stable enough--there's a helicopter that uses it as fuel. Whether the bombers could ensure things were sufficiently free of contamination to avoid catalyzing it is another matter...