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OK - as for the pestle and mortar - making gunpowder by pestle and mortar is inefficient (i should know, I've done it) and the ammount of powder you'd need to blow up a plane would require three rather large sacks of ingredients (potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur), a pestle and mortar, and a container to pack the resulting gunpowder in.
You'd have to get these things through customs (who run detection systems for nitrates, as I said earlier), and you'd to mix the ingredients and pack your bomb without anyone on the plane stopping you.
As for how easy it is to blow up a plane - there have been groups all over the world that have been interested in doing it for decades. The current round of percieved terroists (and I use the phrase perceived, because pretty much everyone that has been arrested has been not yet convicted in a reputable court).
I lived in London at the height of the IRA bombing campaign, and with much lower levels of security than are in place currently, they managed a handful of significant bombs.
The bombs used on 7/7 were large enough to totally fill a moderate sized rucksack, and still only managed to tear open a train carriage or demolish the roof of a bus.
The amount that you could smuggle onto a plane if you had to hide it in the lining of a bag simply would not have the destructive force to blow a plane out of the air.
The most likely source of any terror attacks on planes remains the threat of violence agaist passengers and crew, and to be frank, a group of attackers who don't care about their own lives could probably hijack a planewith shoelaces if they were skilled and fit.
Threaten to garotte a small child and see how many people rush you.
The fear of terror attacks far outweighs the reality - the lawmakers and intelligence gatherers have seen too many bond films and really believe that there exists some compound that can be fitted inside a drink can that has the destructive force to destroy a plane.
A well equipped design laboratory MAY be able to come up with a grenade that was shaped like a can, was triggered by the ringpull, and was not detectable by x-rays or neutron scans, and was sitably washed to remove all chemical residues, but somehow i think that ( a ) it would be out of the reach of mst countries, let alone terror groups, and ( b ) if you had the tech and the backing to do it, you'd be better off investing that tech and money into using a ground to air missile.
Look at the REAL strikes that have taken place in the past few years, and you'll note that the most effective have been very low tech.
September 11th was achieved with craft knives, the damage to a US warship was achieved by a speedboat and an RPG, the 7/7 killings were a few kilos of TATP cooked up in a home laboratory and lugged onto trains in backpacks.
I'm not saying that terrorists will never down a plane, but I am prepared to bet doughnuts to dogshit that it won't be by mixing innocuous liquids that were in carry on bagage.
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Overhead, the Albatross hangs motionless upon the air,
And deep beneath the rolling waves,
In labyrinths of Coral Caves,
The Echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand;
And everthing is Green and Submarine
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