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As far as spoofing a real flight until it is too late, that is my greatest fear…

An arriving B727 from some place in South America, on an approved IFR flight plan, listed under a current call sign, maybe even a regular cargo operator or contract cargo operation flying into Miami or Atlanta International around 8 AM on a Monday or a Friday morning.

Aircraft is doing everything fine, following ATC instructions to a TEE, cleared for the approach, checks in with tower then cleared to land… plane looks good to the tower controller, is established on approach gear and flaps down, then just about 30 seconds before touchdown the aircraft appears to be going missed approach, the pilot checks in with tower…

ATL tower Jihad 123 on the missed were not configured to land…

ATL would not bat an eye at this call all it means is that the pilot did not like something, maybe he was too fast, Co-pilot was slow with a checklist or he honestly forgot something and wanted to come around again just to be safe.

As the jet powers up, it instead of climbing out on runway heading begins to veer towards the main terminal and car park, 30 seconds later it slams into the terminal and explodes because it was carrying a cargo hold full of explosives and kills half the people in the terminal and on a busy day God only knows how many that would be.

And in all honesty it would look like an accident in the beginning.

That is my worst fear.

I’m not too worried about someone hijacking another jet, the passengers are just to ready to fight for their lives for that to happen again.

An arriving B727 from ... South America ... approved flight plan, listed under a current call sign, maybe even a regular cargo operator or contract cargo operation ...

Fortunately, a *real* terrorist would still have to:

a) secure an aircraft

b) keep the fact that a flying, serviceable aircraft is missing/suppress calls from the organization that would be *missing* said aircraft

c) secure/sign for fuel for the flight *without* arousing suspician as A LOT of fuel would be just 'missing' and surely shyow up on meters/fuel logs somewhere

d) 'inject' a bona-fide flight plan into the system from a 'trusted' source or channel - and if these are verified by a 'call back' to the originating source or organization I don't know ...

Then there is the aspect of using pre-assigned transponder codes known only to the captain (in an IFF capacity) and valid *only* for that flight (this technique is currenly used - but sparingly to my knowledge here in the US) ...

Are flights monitored across the Atlantic? (I think not)

If so, it would be simplest to have a real, approved flight take off and disappear, and have our Air Jihad 727 show up in the ADIZ five hours later, claiming to be Saudia Flight 6 or whatever.

By the time we had visual, it wou,d be too late.