Unidentified plane violates no fly zone

Originally Posted by SMHarman

No, but airspace over London at low level is restricted so if you have not filed you flight plan you would be in trouble, that and flying a single engine over London is I think unapproved as you have no get out of jail free plan in the event of engine failiure.

Not all planes with 2 engines can stay in the air running on the one engine, such as the beechcraft baron. Even with just the pilot, if the one engine was the fail you won't be able to keep it in the air for long.

[Gareth]

Originally Posted by Flubflow

The damage it could cause would rather depend on how much anthrax, explosives or radioactive dirty bombs etc it could have been carrying.

I know... I was only joking. If you wanna get serious, I wrote my university dissertation on airline security, as I was working for Air France at the time and had access-all-areas at Orly airport. But I much prefer being lighthearted.

Originally Posted by zoombini

Just what I was going to say.

See above.

[SMHarman]

Useful article from the CAA

http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/7/DAP_EIS04.pdf

In air traffic control
terms, distances of 30 miles and less are comparatively
small and take only a few minutes flying time. Typically,
aircraft inbound to the UKâ₠¬ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚¢s major airports are routinely
required to intercept the Instrument Landing System (ILS)
facility, an aircraft-interpreted aid comprising centre-line
and glide-slope elements radiating from the touchdown
point and aligned with the runway concerned, from a
height of approximately 2000 - 2500 feet. During the night
the joining level is often set higher. The fact that aircraft
need to be established on the ILS centre line at
approximately 10 miles from touchdown will explain why
many areas of the southeast are over-flown at relatively
low level. If the aircraft were significantly higher they
would be unable to achieve a safe intercept of the ILS
glide-slope. The need for aircraft to over-fly built up areas
at all has also been questioned. Unfortunately, the
west/east alignment of Heathrow Airportââ‚à ‚¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s main runways
and the location of the airport in relation to London mean
that aircraft on final approach to the westerly runways will
inevitably fly over congested areas of population en-route
to the ILS and when established on the facility.

[BBKing]

Living under the Heathrow approach is a fact of life for thousands, including me.

It's worth checking the photographs of what damage the Cessna did in 1994 - it hit the lawn and bounced into the White House.

Mind you, the plane that hit the Pirelli Building in Milan did a fair bit more damage. Modern space frame buildings are more susceptible than older masonry structures like the White House and Capitol - it would indeed bounce off either of those.

You can fill a Cessna 172 with about 400kg of stuff, including pilot and fuel. That's not much, although any terrorists out there might note that it's enough for a reasonable sized conventional bomb (the 2001 Ealing bomb contained 40kg of explosive, but wasn't fatal to people even standing five metres away).

Dirty bombs, anthrax and such things are far more frightening in newspapers than in reality. Any terrorist worth his salt knows that releasing a lot of energy in a short space of time is the best way to get noticed.

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by BBKing

You can fill a Cessna 172 with about 400kg of stuff, including pilot and fuel.

So Pilot say 80kg - Fuel 40Kg payload at most 280kg

[BBKing]

American pilot - 160kg :P

What sort of volume is 280kg of explosive? Cessnas aren't that roomy inside.

[I do hope MI5 aren't reading the next set of Google searches I'm about to do]

C-4 plastic explosive - 1.60 g/cc

1 cc is a cube 1cm on each side. 1000cm on each side is a cubic metre or 100x100x100 cc=10^6 cc

So 1m^3 of C-4 weighs 1 600 000 grams or 1 600 kg or 1.6 tonnes. This would be

a) Quite expensive (£24,00 0 or so)
b) Devastating
c) Heavier than the entire aircraft

200kg would be 1/8 of a cubic metre of C-4, or a cube 50cm on each side. That would fit in a Cessna, I think, and it would have a chance of getting into the air.

200kg is officially (for quarrying/demolition) unsafe up to 500m away - not that it will kill you, but 500m is a safe distance for the hoi polloi to stand at.

200kg will blow a hole through seven feet of reinforced concrete, roughly, if placed directly in contact. Obviously it's hard to park a Cessna close enough to the building to get the full effect.

So in the worst case scenario a Cessna with as much high-grade explosive as it can carry having a really lucky hit would probably knock a hole in the wall of the White House or Capitol and make life rather unpleasant within 100-200 metres. So getting down into the bunkers seems quite a sensible precaution.

I'm not going to post any links. I can hear helicopters coming!