I haven’t looked at any of the videos from this terrorist attack, but can someone tell me how large the explosion radius was, approximately? It’s like 20 grams of explosive from what I recall.
If you held the pager in your hand you’d lose the hand and burn your body.
If you had it on your waist your pelvis is getting blown out.
Small but powerful explosion. Think of it like holding a powerful firework vs that firework going off 1 meter from you. You’ll be fine (but stunned and bruised) by the nearby explosion vs you will be seriously harmed if it’s touching you. That’s the difference. People wearing these things were put in critical condition in the hospital or outright killed, others were luckier.
On a flight you could use it to break into the cockpit. It would easily blow the lock on a door if you taped it to the door. Or you could blow the door or window of the plane and crash it. With more than one you could take over a plane, I’m not convinced that passengers these days would sit nicely for anyone doing so though after the use of planes as suicide attacks. People would choose to fight.
Radius is hard to say, they were like a tenth of a frag grenade (complete with the frag of batteries and pager bits.) Enough to blow a hole in a plane for sure.
This is a very serious issue. The TSA needs to start auditing everything that gets onto an airplane. They should designate secure areas in airports where everything and everyone that enters must undergo inspection beforehand. They should set up some kind of checkpoint for this purpose. It would be a good idea to have personnel verify the identity of individuals before they are allowed into the inspection area. Perhaps they could then have persons remove their personal belongings, including their potentially explosive pagers, and set them aside for separate inspection. They could even make them remove their shoes and belts for added safety. This might sound like a crazy idea right now but I think with sufficient research they might be able to build a machine that can detect metal, and require people to pass through this machine before being allowed through. They could have personnel stationed on the other end to conduct secondary inspections of passengers if needed. As for baggage and other personal belongings, they may be able to leverage a technology used in the medical industry, the X-ray machine, to see the inside of bags and electronic devices to detect concealed explosives or other prohibited items.
The current situation where they just let you walk straight in from outside right onto to the plane is unacceptable. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?
The TSA is security theater. They fail security audits to an absurd degree. It is only there to ensure consumer confidence in buying air travel and nothing more.
I wonder about these sorts of things on stuff as minor as local public transport, and I feel like the security guards are not earning their money back (so to speak).
(also, public transport should entirely be paid with land taxes)
Public transit security is mostly a waste, it is mostly about “deterring” fare evasion, which is a very minor cost compared to the cost of training and employing entire humans to check for fare evasion.
The money would be better spent on addressing root causes of fair evasion. Out all of it into funding free transit fairs and it would be auch better use of municipal funds.
We had a month of free transit here and everyone said the results were very positive (its already mostly paid for by taxes anyway), so… idk, I’m guessing neolib Labor will ignore it and carry on. We have free transit on Sundays now
Very funny but I doubt the pager explosive would be particularly detectable.
tl;dr anyone got the movie rights to this novel?
There’s a really funny bit idea someone could do with this.
Great, now I’ll have to buy an overpriced water bottle and pager after checkin.
Lithium batteries are basically all firebombs.
True, but they’re also rigged in about five different ways to specifically not explode. And then about five more ways to breach and off-gas instead of blowing up.
You’d have to make major adjustments to actually have one violently explode. To the point where you’re just making a pipe bomb.
