Can one really synthesize TATP in an airplane? Probably not ...

[Mehdron]

I’m going to answer my own question here, but the word needs to get out so that maybe the TSA will let us carry water on airplanes again sometime soon.
Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?

Better killing through chemistry
Making a quantity of TATP sufficient to bring down an airplane is not quite as simple as ducking into the toilet and mixing two harmless liquids together.

First, you’ve got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water. Only this is risky, and can lead to mission failure by means of burning down your makeshift lab before a single infidel has been harmed.

But let’s assume that you can obtain it in the required concentration, or cook it from a dilute solution without ruining your operation. Fine. The remaining ingredients, acetone and sulfuric acid, are far easier to obtain, and we can assume that you’ve got them on hand.

Now for the fun part. Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drinks bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane. It’s all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don’t forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked “perishable foods”), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You’re going to need them.

It’s best to fly first class and order Champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate - especially if you have those cold gel-packs handy to supplement the ice, and the Styrofoam chiller handy for insulation - to get you through the cookery without starting a fire in the lavvie.

Also, see NameBright - Domain Expired

So, lets say you have your oxidizer mixture and now you are going to
mix it with acetone. In a proper lab environment, that’s not going to
be too awful – your risk of dying horribly is significant but you
could probably keep the whole thing reasonably under control – you
can use dry ice to cool a bath to -78C, say, and do the reaction
really slowly by adding the last reactant dropwise with an addition
funnel. If you’re mixing the stuff up in someone’s bathtub, like the
guys who bombed the London subways a year ago did, you can take some
reasonable precautions to make sure that your reaction doesn’t go
wildly out of control, like using a lot of normal ice and being very,
very, very careful and slow. You need to keep the stuff cool, and you
need to be insanely meticulous, or you’re going to be in a world of
hurt.

So, we’ve covered in the lab and in the bathtub. On an airplane? On an
airplane, the whole thing is ridiculous. You have nothing to cool the
mixture with. You have nothing to control your mixing with. You can’t
take a day doing the work, either. You are probably locked in the
tiny, shaking bathroom with very limited ventilation, and that isn’t
going to bode well for you living long enough to get your explosives
manufactured. In short, it sounds, well, not like a very good idea.

If you choke from fumes, or if your explosives go off before you’ve
got enough made to take out the airplane – say if you only have
enough to shatter the mirror in the bathroom and spray yourself with
one of the most evil oxidizers around – you aren’t going to be famous
as the martyr who killed hundreds of westerners. Your determination
and willingness to die doesn’t matter – you still need to get the job
done.

You also need quite a bit of organic peroxides made by this route in
order to be sure of taking down a plane. I doubt that just a few grams
is going to do it – though of course the first couple of grams you
are likely to go off before you make any more. The possibility of
doing all this in an airplane lav or by some miracle at your seat
seems really unlikely. Perhaps I’m just ignorant here – it is
possible that a clever person could do it. I can’t see an easy way
though.

[Rick]

Since the first reports came out, I have been thinking aobut this and trying to come up with a practical 2 or 3 part liquid explosive.
I could not think of one, now it seems like the bad guys couldn’t either.

[samclem]

Since there really isn’t a General Question here, let’s try MPSIMS. Not that your post was pointless, but it has to go somewhere.

samclem

[Baffle]

And all they really needed to do was smuggle fifty mercury thermometers aboard. Tsk.