The article was kinda long, so maybe I missed something about them blowing it up in flight.
To me, the more destructive scenario would be to wait until the plane had just docked at the gate and then detonate the bomb (assembled in flight) via cell phone signal. Presupposing a sufficiently powerful explosive, that would destroy several aircraft, kill more people and damage/destroy the terminal as well as those inside it.
Imagine this being done at LAX. That airport would be useless for weeks, maybe longer. Count up the economic impact on that one.
The reason a terrorist wishes to explode his assembled device at 30,000 feet instead of at the terminal when landed is that a small bomb assembled by a team in flight does a lot more damage than a much larger bomb exploded on the ground. Not that much fuel in most aircraft when they land. There is a certain logic to it...
If you use a 'larger' bomb on the ground, the folks on the aircraft who are not killed by the explosion may attempt to debark to the relative close ground. A much smaller bomb exploded at the aforementioned 30,000 ft in a pressurized coke-can which is the aircraft fuselage gets additional help in destroying the aircraft skin by the internal pressure and the force of the 550 mph air going past the aircraft's now ruptured skin. A another happy benefit for the terrorist is that those who are not killed by the immediate explosion of his bomb will not probably survive the lack of oxygen at 30,000 ft, nor the fall to the ground below.
Your terminal idea could work, but why put a team on the aircraft when you could have a team on the fuel truck set to explode, plus your ground team has a good chance to escaped. In the air, short of a 'James Bond'-like parachute escape, the air team buys it...
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