Somehow I get the inkling that terrorist groups probably aren't going to start trying to crash into office buildings with a Cessna.
He speaks of the farmer's community though as a tight nit community. Used planes are sold and bought within the community, farmers themselves would be very suspicious selling to someone "shady", and the FBI knows about this threat vector as well and is monitoring it closely (iirc).
So there's an example of a small plane and its potential use case in terrorism. Not sure how easily a Cessna could be rigged up to do something of that kind.
Another attack vector in the future might be small drones. Due to them not holding tons of gasoline, some form of biochemical weapon or radioactive material could be distributed.
Muller argues that the mass panic of an incident involving biochemical materials or radioactivity would most likely be a greater danger than the "material threat" itself. Many people would be scared of "radioactivity" without much understanding. People are not particularly well educated how radioactive decline works, what half life times really mean (long half life meaning slow release, less imminent danger), why various types of radioactivity can be quite different from another etc.
So don't underestimate terrorists. Luckily, don't underestimate smart people in three letter agencies thinking about this either.
Sounds prudent of them. If a small plane spreads radioactive material over an area they are in as an act of terrorism, even a nuclear expert with 5 PhDs will first panic and try to get the fuck away and only much later care to go into the minituae of the situation.
The imminent reaction of "let's get out of here" in the face of danger was not what I was referring to here.
I mean, this was true of a similar incident that didn't involve those factors. The United States' overreaction to 9/11 has cost several orders of magnitude more lives than were actually taken on that day.
Although I suppose things get murkier if you include copycat crimes - not too easy to copy "hijack a commercial airliner", but a whole heap of people could very easily strap a biochemical threat to a drone.
The gasoline attack (liquid fuel in general) vector in relation to agricultural planes (planes used to spray crops) is real though and the relevant part to your comment. Fly it into a full football stadium with 100k people, so small planes are not to be underestimated.
You can easily kill more people with a sewage pipe pipe mortar, or ramming a truck.
You don't see many those "smart people" even trying.
The "intelligence community" are a nest of inscrutable incompetence, and idiocy. That's the bottom line.
1994 - Cessna 150 vs. White House South Lawn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Eugene_Corder
2002 - Cessna 172 vs. Bank of America Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_Cessna_172_crash
2010 - Piper Dakota vs. IRS office in Austin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack
>on September 11, 1994
Wow.
And the Apache is way more intimidating than the jet.
The Tamil Tigers did run a campaign of dropping small bombs from planes that were too slow for the Sri Lankan air force to intercept at one point.
