[familyop]

"Consider a drone carrying few pounds of nitroglycerin or acetone peroxide hitting a wing fuel tank or the cockpit."

It would be like trying to throw a bomb by hand to hit a bullet in flight--not very likely. Threads like this one make me glad that evil people aren't often very dedicated to lifetimes of study or hard work in any single pursuit of skills or invention.

[RavenLooneyToon]

Anyone of average intelligence and above average skills can swap out the motors and blades to achieve a greatly increased lift threshold.
You don't aim for the engine.
You use the on board Uzi and take out the pilots’ nest.
The best defense is for security to have hunter-killer drones to take out the threat.

[Seizethecarp]

“Threads like this one make me glad that evil people aren’t often very dedicated to lifetimes of study or hard work in any single pursuit of skills or invention.”

Some aren’t, but some are.

You will recall that the 911 planning team were engineers who calculated that if they crashed a fully fueled 757 into a Trade Tower it would collapse the tower as it did.

In the first Trade Tower bombing in 1993, these same engineers ALMOST succeeded in causing one tower to fall into the other and they did this be figuring exactly the location in the basement of the first tower and how much explosive would be needed to achieve that exactly the way that a lumberjack aims a tree to fall in a certain direction.

They also sent four highly educated, intelligent men to flying school to learn how to fly after they had seized the aircraft opportunistically with BOXCUTTERS.

I regard these dedicated Islamists to be fully capable of continuing to find new ways to crash airliners adding to:

1. shoe bomb
2. underwear bomb
3. toner cartridge bomb

etc...

We must not underestimate our enemy!