On February 2, 2016, a suicide bomber attempted to bring down a commercial airliner.
He failed — not because of luck, but because physics didn’t cooperate.
A laptop bomb was detonated aboard Daallo Airlines Flight 159, an Airbus A321 departing Mogadishu, Somalia.
Just minutes after takeoff, the explosion ripped a hole in the aircraft’s fuselage.
Normally, that would be catastrophic.
But this time, one critical detail changed everything.
The plane wasn’t at cruising altitude
The aircraft was still climbing.
That single fact saved every other person on board.
At higher altitude, the pressure difference between the cabin and the outside atmosphere is extreme. A blast under those conditions can cause rapid, uncontrolled decompression and structural failure.
But at lower altitude, the pressure differential is smaller.
Instead of destroying the plane, the explosion caused localized explosive decompression.
The result was brutal — and precise.
The bomber was ejected out of the aircraft through the hole he created.
He was the only fatality.
The aircraft survived. The passengers survived.
The pilots executed emergency procedures immediately and returned the damaged plane safely to Mogadishu.
All other passengers survived.
Only minor injuries were reported.
This wasn’t a miracle.
It was:
altitude
pressure physics
modern aircraft design
and disciplined pilot training
All working exactly as intended.
When science refuses to cooperate
This attack didn’t fail because the threat was small.
It failed because engineering and physics set hard limits.
One of the rare cases where terrorism didn’t win —
because reality didn’t bend.