A very interesting article in the Guardian. Here is an excerpt, but you should read it in its entirety:
We have no access to the reasoning of the perpetrators, but it seems safe to suppose that they want to cause as much havoc as possible to as many people and “infidel” countries as possible by the cheapest of means. Crashing a plane fits this double aim very well. International flights involve at least two countries, origin and destination, and the passengers nationalities typically draw in many more. The borderless nature of the target further encourages fearful inferences in more than just the countries directly involved – if they picked Amsterdam–Detroit, next time they could just as well pick Frankfurt–Miami or Dubai–London – which prompts the introduction of costly new security measures.
As for the means, a small amount of explosive can down a plane and just one person, with little or no military training, can carry out the attack. Attacking flights perfectly embodies the rationale of “martyrdom operations”, which – as Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Ladens deputy, once said – are “the most successful way of inflicting damage against the opponent and the least costly to the mujahideen in casualties”. It took four men to kill 57 people in the London underground attack of 7/7; if Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had succeeded on the flight he took, he would have killed 290 by himself. In the grim maximisation game of terror, that amounts to supreme efficiency.
via Why does al-Qaida target planes? | Diego Gambetta | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
Tea and Politics 