I saw this as it was breaking on the news - I muttered under my breath, "I'll bet this mutt didn't even pay for THIS method of travel." Today I see the follow up stories, and bozo sure enough charged his own shipment to the company he workED for. It only took a few ounces of semtex to bring down Pan Am 103, IIRC. I think it was the batteries in a walkman that had been replaced with semtex. That tiny (relatively) blast caused enough structural damage at altitude to cause the aircraft to break up. This is pretty scary AK, gotta agree with that. E.

I was thinking pretty much the same. If a person hiding a crate can get onto a cargo plane *undetected*, walk around the cargo hold while in flight *undetected*, and arrive all the way to the delivery address of the crate *undetected*, imagine what a terrorist suicide agent could do inside a cargo hold (cut hydraulic lines, blow up a bomb, etc.) or worse, enter the cabin area and hijack the plane. If this is the best airline security can do, we might as well just bomb our own cities so the terrorists don't have any targets.

Airline security by and large is still arbitrary, and not comprehensive. I remember flying in a British Airways flight from London to Newark 3-6 months after 9-11, when the guy next to me looks at me and says "you know what I just realised, I have a good sized pen knife in my hand baggage." There is significant damage an unarmed person can do, including possibly bringing the plane down. The pit and doors have to somehow be sealed off and protected areas from the rest of the flight when in the air.