This is one person's commentary on this question.

If true that seat 19A was right on top of the fuel tank, why wait until the end of a long transatlantic flight to start wanking? If I were smarter, I'd try to detonate when the tanks are full. That's just me.

Why the Jockstrap Bomber picked seat 19A - News- msnbc.com

Aren't gas tanks more explosive when they are almost empty? It's not the liquid that's very flamable, but the vapors. I think this reporter needs to do more research.

That is what I was thinking as I read it. Such as, TWA 800.

And now a bunch of planes have to leave a thousand pounds of liquid fuel in the center tank so that it's not all vapor.

CAL had it's center tank restriction "lifted" this past year.

Back to draining the center's all the way to ZERO.

Hopefully that was due to some upgrades to the system and not an "engineering analysis"


Engineering Analysis:

Management would like to save some fuel and it's been 14 years since TWA 800, so there shouldn't be too much of an uproar if we just conveniently forget about this whole issue.

The theory is that, from a terrorism perspective, that it would have the greatest "impact" (psychological) by having the plane blow up and crash over the US, and preferably over a major metropolitan area.

Then why over Detroit?

I heard that the reason why TSA enacted all the goofy policies right after this is because they believe there may have been additional persons out there who were going to replicate the -exact- same type of attack. The feeling being that suicide bombers are generally not too bright and even after a failed attempt would not comprehend how to change their strategy to beat security - that they'd simply do the same thing. That, or the bombers themselves would not be able to be contacted by their support staff and receive additional instruction.

Common sense tells us no one would attempt to do the exact same thing, but what if there were 2-3 other people out there with instructions to all act the same, lacking clue to change up their strategy at the last minute.

They caught someone a month before this guy with the same set of explosives before he boarded.
The governments who knew of the case, including ours, failed to tell everyone. Then they got caught with their pants down on Christmas.

Do you guys realize how close we came to losing our economy 9-11 style, all be it whats left of it, all over again due to complete incompetence in our government? Not to mention, it took the administration a couple of days to respond and when they did, they said "the system worked"???

The irony being, the exact same failure to communicate caused 9/11 as well.

My hatred of the TSA and beauracracy knows no bounds...