Word: bombe
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...Flight 253 deplaned in Detroit, they were held in the baggage area for more than five hours until FBI agents interviewed them. They were not allowed to call their loved ones. They were given no food. When one of the pilots tried to use the bathroom before a bomb-sniffing dog had finished checking all the carry-on bags, an officer ordered him to sit down, according to passenger Alain Ghonda, who thought it odd. "He was the pilot. If he wanted to do anything, he could've crashed the plane." It was a metaphor for the rest...
...them. Not until Northwest Flight 253 was beginning its final descent into Detroit, at about 11:40 Christmas morning, did a handful of passengers step in to do what all the early-warning systems and security personnel could not: stop a terrorist trying to detonate a bomb on a plane on the quietest morning of the year. Just as the cabin crew strapped in for landing, an explosion - it sounded like a firecracker - came from the left side of the fuselage just over the wing. Alain Ghonda - a 38-year-old, Silver Spring, Md., real estate consultant, who was sitting...
...undetected onto the Detroit-bound flight. That worked: during his layover, Abdulmutallab most likely encountered nothing more than ID checks and a metal detector at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. He was betting that any pat-down - unlikely as that was - would not come close to the tiny bomb in the crotch of his trousers. Fellow passenger Ghonda, who transferred to Flight 253 after a flight from Ghana, reported that although he passed through a metal detector, neither his bags nor his body were hand-searched...
...Experts say the undergarment bomb probably would have shown up on the new generation of whole-body imaging scanners that are chiefly designed to detect explosives. These devices, using millimeter waves or X-rays, generate a picture so detailed that the officials reviewing them are located elsewhere for the sake of passenger modesty. But Amsterdam's Schiphol has only about 15 of these machines serving some 90 gates, and they are used on a voluntary basis only on short-haul flights within Europe. That's partly because the wave scanners are costly - they sell for $180,000 - and partly because...
...made especially for shoes, designed to work while they're still on your feet. But they have been slow to be deployed. Only one device, which sniffs the air for trace explosives, is in relatively widespread use, at just 36 airports - and it would not have detected Abdulmutallab's bomb...