They were lucky someone wasn't carrying one on a plane
Take a look at all the photos of B-17s taking severe combat damage yet returning home. Jetliners are a lot more redundant today than the B-17s were.
However, if the hole took out the flight controls, or set a fire, then the airplane has a big problem.
These are all fake news. According to Hollywood, a single bullet from a gun will cause an airplane to break apart in mid-air. You can't honestly expect me to believe Hollywood movies get physics wrong.
Similarly, as soon as a car's wheels leave the ground, it bursts into a fireball according to many TV shows I've seen.
/s
The bigger risk to the plane (and passengers) would likely be if the person carrying the explosive was working in the airport and the explosion occurred during a critical moment, like when a pilot is taxiing.
I take it you would have no problem being on a plane with one (or even multiple) of these pagers going off then? What kind of argument is this?
The comment implied Israel was risking blowing up an entire plane when we were discussing whether it was targeted or not.
Go play in the other room, the grownups are talking.
I would think they would have that ability, not just to avoid a horrible accident like blowing up a plane, but also to gather valuable tracking intel on a terrorist organization.
Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.
That said, pagers don't continuously ping the tower like cell phones do. They can stay receive only until the moment you chose to send a message.
Somehow I don't think so.
Receiving data from a network is a connection, no matter how you want to define it.
I think it's safest to assume Hezbollah are using strong transmitters, because they'll want to be able to broadcast across rather large areas and in a way that resists potential jamming.
On the flip side, I'm having a hard time imagining these as threats to an entire airplane, given the tight constraints on how much explosive power can be secretly snuck into a functioning pager.