PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Two BA pilots questioned about mobile phone incident
Old 27th Jun 2011, 09:03
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Mercenary Pilot
 
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it can easily blow a hole in an aircraft skin.
No, apparently it can't. Experts did a lot of testing after the Nigerian Christmas day bomber tried it with a mix of chemicals concealed on his person. The BBC did a documentary which showed that a much larger amount of explosives would be needed to actually bring the aircraft down from structural failure. Also, the size of modern mobile phones is significantly smaller from mobile cell-phones from 10-20 years ago.

The programme mythbusters also did a segment with 'pen bombs' made using industrial high explosives which although believed could fatally injure a human, were not actually powerful enough to even cut a foam mannequin in half so I think it would be extremely unlikely to destroy an aircraft in flight.
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