It wouldn't be hard to maneuver it right in front of the airliner and cause a collision. While the aircraft would likely survive an engine strike, at only a few thousand feet of altitude it doesn't give much time to recover.
Society's based on some amount of mutual trust. We can't lock everything down and treat every person as a potential criminal. That leads to an inefficient and dystopian country.
It's pretty easy to significantly distrust rail transportation. There are hundreds of rail suicides every year, and each and every time the line shuts down until everything's cleaned up. And of course you could destructively interfere with the train or railway, a rather common sabotage operation during WWII.
When you go through the math on lost productivity due to train delays, you get some interesting conclusions. If a commuter train has 1,000 passengers making an average of $50 per hour who are, a delay is $833 per minute. That means it's more efficient (not going to touch on ethics or legality) to make minimal accommodations for disabled passengers and provide them point-to-point car service, instead.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-22/the-amazi...
'“You only get this chance once. The whole world is watching. I had to," Moreno told investigators, according to the complaint. "People don’t know what’s going on here. Now they will.”'
(Nothing about this story makes sense to me.)
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/trai...
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/best-reads/2015/1...
But that was a relatively undetermined attack. What if someone welds something directly on to the rails or cuts something out? It may get noticed in tens of minutes, but is that really fast enough?
Similarly it seems like it wouldn't be insanely hard to poison water supplies, doing some damage before it gets shut off or destroy other bits of infrastructure (I hear it has been tried with the electricity grid).
Society is a fairly complex machine and I'm surprised how well it works.
But I am also surprised how well it works. I think people just don't suck as much as one would expect.
The US has a total length of about 300 000km of railway network and that probably counts multi-track connections once. And it doesn’t include subway or anything. So that would be a lot of sensors that need to be placed and maintained. And you’d need to except some failure of sensors, so you cannot just stop if a single sensor goes haywire.
It’s certainly not impossible, but also not trivially done.
While train robberies are now decidedly rare, railroad police still exist today to patrol and protect the right-of-way, particularly in cities where theft, vandalism, and interference remains a real safety hazard. While less glamorous than train robbery, a common problem today is the theft of metal from signals, which disables the signals and creates a possible safety hazard.
"I don't want the ATF to shoot my dog"
<proceeds to dump spent launcher tube they stole from work wherever is convenient>
They make train de-railers specifically to protect work crews in rail yards. Someone who doesn't care about removing it later could just weld a similar shape (a slice of L channel would probably work in a pinch) to a track with some batteries. It should only take about 30sec if you walk up to the track ready to go.
Would have been top news if it weren't for the fact that America was reeling from an explosion of cases in the COVID19 pandemic.
That's why you have to pay for insurance (in most places at least) so that you are pre-paying for your liability.
Having recently driven on South Florida freeways, I can vouch for this statement.
It would be much more severe if it occurred at, say, 300 feet. Not enough time to fully react, but still far enough from touchdown that sacrificing speed could lead you to a stall before you get it on the ground, or before the autothrottle can respond (on the other engine(s)).
Immediately before takeoff, the autothrottle is configured to maintain V2 speed; so no, an engine failure on takeoff is an event you are always already prepared for.
EDIT: For the 777 for example, and (that I know of) all other Boeing aircraft and probably Airbus too (but don't quote me on that), you can also see your V-speeds on the speed tape during the takeoff roll. This video shows them on the 777, they're the green numbers on the far left. The flight crew also calls them out. Finally, the green arrow pointing upwards or downwards is the projection of what your speed will be 10 seconds from now. Note how the programmed speed (top left, purple) is the V2 speed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw9P-aMFYE0
The V2 speed is achieved by pitching for that specific airspeed, followed by an acceleration phase and flap retraction schedule if necessary.
Source: I'm a commercial pilot
You don't want the autothrottle to add thrust in an asymmetric situation, that's far more dangerous than losing a couple of kt or temporarily accepting a small deviation below glideslope. Because with asymmetric thrust, any power change causes yaw that you need to counteract that with rudder. You want manual control over both to ensure they happen in coordination.
That is why I never understand people who back flying car projects.
Others have also mentioned its not impossible to weaponize a laptop battery. Hell get enough cell phones on board?