Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If you tell the airport that it's closed and that you'll be shooting down planes that attempt to take or or land, that does the trick. Because commercial pilots are not usually interested in testing those assertions.
Or if you were trying to close the airport, you could crater the runway. Destroying the fuel storage facilities -- which is what made the really black smoke in the pictures of Beirut that are all over the place -- seems calculated to different ends.
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Do you really think that the world -- or you, personally -- would respond more favorably to a threat to shoot down civilian airliners, than it would to the destruction of runways? Please.
Israel in particular could not make such a threat, when Israel and Israelis have faced attacks on civilian planes so many times in the past.
And I beg to differ -- I would not be shocked at all to see Iran (for example) send a plane, empty but for two pilots with martyr fantasies, to "test that assertion."
