Boeing has released the video of a controlled explosion onboard its 747 aircraft, which was conducted to test the impact of a terrorist attack.
The experiment – organised as part of the BBC Two documentary ‘How Safe Are Our Skies?’ – used the same amount of explosive pentaerythritol (or PETN) that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was accused of smuggling onto a recent flight from Amsterdam to Detroit as part of a failed terrorist attack.
The results proved that the Boeing 747 would have still been able to land without bursting its fuselage, even if the bomb had successfully exploded.
“If it was a more rigid material then we might have seen a crack or breakthrough but this is actually quite a flexible material. I was extremely impressed by the aircraft structure. It can sustain quite a hefty thump,” commented Dr John Wyatt, an international terrorism and explosives adviser to the UN, who replicated the conditions onboard the Detroit flight on a decommissioned Boeing 747 at an aircraft graveyard in Gloucestershire, England.
The video: Boeing 747 survives bomb test
Source ASC