Has anyone seen/heard any theories as to why he tried to detonate it right before landing instead of over the ocean?
If nothing else, a fiery crash at the airport would be “ spectacular “, AQ likes to go for that , “wow” factor. They’re sick SOBs.
Maximize casualties by blowing up an aircraft over an urban area.
Terrorists want to terrorize. They need the media to do half of their work for them.
There’s little terror effect upon the wider populace for blowing up a plane where no one would see it go down.
Blow it up on final as it is coming in over a very densely populated area... where there is plenty of media that will be on the scene in mere minutes... and you’ve got a far higher “terror” potential than a plane that just disappears over oceans.
Militarily, there were far better attacks that could have been made instead of 9/11. Terrorists could have taken down huge swathes of the US power grid, creating a huge national turmoil. They could have poisoned major US urban water systems. They could have done a great many things with the number of people they had, yet they chose to attack the WTC with airplanes. Why? Because the majority of the national news media is there in NYC. There was a huge media coverage of the event - live, in full color, from many, many camera angles. The media did the rest of their work for them, in grand style.
As csvset points out, Al Qaida is “wedded to the spectacular.” Their dream was to make 10 or more planes disappear at once over the ocean. But what if they believe they can’t pull off a plot of that scale at this point without getting caught, and they figure they can only risk taking out one at a time? One plane disappearing is certainly bad, but one going down on Christmas with plenty of news footage of burning wreckage...that would be the spectacle they’re looking for.