Flight 253: The Underwear Bomber and What Came Next

On Christmas Day, two thousand nine, Northwest Airlines Flight Two Fifty-Three was on final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport when a twenty-three-year-old Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate a bomb sewn into his underwear.

Abdulmutallab had flown from Lagos to Amsterdam, and then boarded the Detroit-bound flight carrying a device packed with PETN and TATP, two powerful explosives, along with a syringe of chemicals intended to trigger the blast. Nearly three hundred passengers and crew were on board. As the aircraft descended toward Michigan, Abdulmutallab activated the device. It caught fire rather than exploding outright. Passengers and flight attendants responded immediately, restraining him and smothering the fire. The plane landed safely. No one died.

Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty to federal charges, including attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He had been radicalized and trained by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen in the months before the attack.

The failed bombing had lasting consequences for air travel. Within days, the Transportation Security Administration accelerated the deployment of full-body imaging scanners at American airports, machines that had been in testing but not yet widely installed. The Christmas Day plot also prompted renewed scrutiny of the no-fly list system, which had failed to flag Abdulmutallab despite his own father having reported concerns about his radicalization to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria weeks earlier. The near-miss over Michigan changed airport security in ways that millions of travelers encounter to this day.