For years explosives engineer John Kettles has been warning about the dangers of liquid explosives and the London bomb plot—where terrorists allegedly planned to blow up ten airliners simultaneously—shows he was right.

Together with his son David, he runs Blast Design, the first company to be allowed to fly high explosives into Ireland. He has also been involved in training and testing airport security staff.

Here, he demonstrates just how powerful liquid explosives are and gives a frightening insight into the devastation that would be caused if terrorists managed to smuggle such a device onto a plane. Britain, he says, is not fully prepared for such an attack.

Jack McKeown reports.

I’m standing in the middle of the woods in rural Perthshire with David Kettles and Courier photographer John Stevenson. David (23) is giving me a liquid explosives demonstration while his father is working offshore, also using liquid explosives to decommission wellheads.

Making the explosive is scarily simple. David takes a chemical, available off the shelf in DIY stores and in a more potent form via wholesale suppliers, and mixes it with a small amount of another, also easily obtainable, agent which ‘sensitises’ it, making the mixture more certain to detonate.

He fills a small plastic coffee cup around a third full with the liquid—perhaps 40ml or so of the stuff. He then places it in a steel tube tied to a stake. The tube is around two feet long and made out of 5mm thick steel. David, who has a BSc in aeronautical engineering and whose degree project examined blast effects on aircraft materials, says the tube is much stronger than an aircraft’s fuselage.

David puts the cup inside the tube, places a detonator in the cup and runs 100 metres of wire back from it. Then he presses a button and all hell breaks loose.

I opted not to use ear protectors and the noise is deafening. Once it fades away I’m fine, with no ringing in my ears, but if I’d been 20 or 30 metres away rather than 100 my eardrums would certainly have burst.

The blast was pretty impressive, kicking up a huge cloud of dirt. Most real life explosions, David explains, do not involve huge bursts of flame like you see in the movies.

After checking the site is safe, David beckons us over. There’s a huge scorch mark in the earth where the liquid went off, and the tube has been blasted away from the stake.

David hands me the metal tube. The thick steel has ‘petalled,’ peeling back like a banana skin. It’s still hot, and when I try to bend one of the petals, using all my force, it budges not one iota.

That detonation of just a tiny amount of liquid explosive would certainly have depressurised a plane and may have brought it down. A 500ml water bottle would certainly bring a plane out of the sky and a wine bottle full or more would take it to pieces.

Quite frankly, it’s terrifying.

Later I meet David’s father, John Kettles. He asks me not to identify the farmhouse from which he runs his company, as explosives are stored there.

Born and brought up in Longforgan, John (45) has been working with explosives for 15 years and his firm, Blast Design, is one of the few specialist explosives companies in the UK.

Blast Design carry out offshore work, demolition of structures, specialist explosives trials simulating possible terrorist IEDs (improvised explosive devices), as well as mining work and even blasting salmon ladders—John and David lowered the waterfall at Cargill’s Leap near Blairgowrie last year, enabling 10 times more salmon to migrate up-river.

John has also written courses on the use and safety of explosives, and helped train and test airport security personnel. His was the first company licensed to fly explosives from the UK to Ireland.

“We did the first flight into Ireland the week after 9/11. The Irish Government had never allowed a plane with explosives to fly into their country before.

“We had tracking devices fitted and did everything we could anticipate they would want security-wise. Even so, there were fighter planes on standby ready to blow the plane out of the sky if it went anywhere near Sellafield, in case of a terror plot.”

One of the companies John works with designs isolation boxes for bombs. These specially designed boxes are constructed to deaden or ‘mitigate’ a blast. In many foreign airports, if a suspicious package is found it is put inside an isolation box, then the box is taken outside to a safe location where it can be detonated.

Currently in design is a box that can fit into a standard air-hostesses trolley. If a bomb is found on a plane, it can be put in the box and if it goes off the box should contain the explosion.

“From a distance of around three metres, you’d feel about the same level of pressure you would from a Coke can opening,” John explains. “It could save a lot of lives.”

To the best of John’s knowledge, apart from the alleged London bomb plot, there have been two documented attacks on aircraft using liquid explosives. “A liquid explosive is thought to have brought down a South Korean passenger plane in 1987, killing all 115 on board.

“The other was foiled by a stewardess. She saw a woman in full Muslim dress boarding a plane carrying a bag that was making chinking noises.

“The stewardess was suspicious of a Muslim woman carrying what appeared to be alcohol, so she took the bag away from her.” Inside, they found four wine bottles filled with liquid explosive . . . and a detonator set to go off during the flight.

“They interrogated the woman very harshly, using truth serum, and ended up convinced she knew nothing about it. She had been asked to carry the bag by her fiance.”

Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP), known as “mother of Satan,” has been the explosive of choice for many al Qaida attacks and can be used in liquid form. However, it’s extremely unstable, making it very risky to produce and use, and there is a decent chance of the would-be terrorist blowing him or herself up before they get to their intended target.

The type of liquid explosive John and David use, which I am not identifying in this article, is cheap and easy to produce, very stable, and frighteningly powerful—just marginally less so than military plastic explosives.

The effects of a detonation like the one I witnessed happening on an aircraft at 35,000 feet do not bear thinking about.

Yet thinking about it is the security services’ job, and John has also been involved in this field. As well as training police and airport security personnel, he has carried out tests of airport security around the world.

In one major airport in the Middle East, John was asked to try and smuggle a bomb through the airport to test its security against terrorist attack.

“I’d been there for a few days and I was standing in the departure lounge talking to the head of the airport. He asked when I was going to carry out the security assessment. I told him I had just done it.

“I was right there in the departure lounge carrying a laptop and calculator stuffed with plastic explosives in my hand luggage. Both had been tested, x-rayed and switched on. He was livid that I’d managed to get past security with them. But technology can always be beaten.”

What’s needed, John reckons, is better people on the job. Low paid workers doing long hours and a repetitive job cannot be fully relied on—they, too, can be beaten.

One tactic John uses to do this is called distraction. He puts explosives in the bottom of his bag, then a large pair of scissors at the top.

“If they search the bag, they take the scissors off you—then stop searching give you back the bag. They feel good because they’ve found something and they think they’ve done their job well, so they let you go without searching the rest of the bag.”

It’s frightening, and what’s more frightening is that what you’ve just read are the things that are safe to print in a newspaper. Off the record, John gave me insights into the world of explosives and airline security procedures that were deeply disturbing, but would be irresponsible to print.

As well as his experience with Britain’s security agencies, part of the reason John is able to supply so much information is the mindset he has adopted to his work.

“There are people who have worked in the explosives industry all their lives and when you ask them why they do something a certain way their answer is, ‘we’ve always done it that way.’

“I’m not like that. I’ve always experimented with how to use and how to mitigate explosives. Basically, we used to go somewhere really remote and just play, until we understood exactly how things worked.

“Much of what we do is improvised—we design something to do a specific job—and that is similar to a terrorist using IEDs There are no books that tell us how to design some charges, so we work it out for ourselves.”

Working all over the world, and particularly in the Middle East, means terrorism is something that is often on John’s mind, and two years ago he was lucky not to be killed in a terrorist strike.

He was carrying out seismic explosives work in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia—detonating explosives then analysing the shockwaves travelling down into the earth can detect oil— when terrorist gunmen massacred 22 western workers at the offices of the company for which he was working.

John, who was in charge of explosives operations, stores, vehicles, training and security, had just delivered a security report suggesting an increase in security measures at all locations. He was told he was overreacting.

“I was in the manager’s office on Friday. On Saturday there was blood on his desk”

That morning, terrorists dressed as police drew up outside the offices. The Saudi National Guard, who were normally outside the building, drove off—whether because they thought they were being relieved or because they were in on the plan may never be known.

John was 20 minutes away at the desert camp, waiting for 20 young Saudis to come for seismic explosives training, when the attack came. He could hear the dull thuds of gunfire in the background and, realising what was happening, turned back everyone heading to Al-Khobar and helped plan for an attack on their camp.

“The terrorists let the Saudi employees go, then asked Western workers if they were Christian or Muslim. If they said Christian they were killed.

“One claimed to be a Muslim, but when he couldn’t recite the Koran, they shot him, too.”

As far back as 2000, John was indicating that liquid explosives are too easily available. That year, he spoke at a conference at St Andrews University, organised by terrorism expert Professor Paul Wilkinson, at which he highlighted the dangers of liquid explosives.

He has also given Government EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) teams demonstrations of liquid explosives, and in many cases the bomb disposal experts have never before encountered the effects he has shown them.

John remains unconvinced, however, that Britain’s security services are doing everything possible to be fully prepared for dealing with an attack.

He believes that the raw materials that can be used—so easily as I have seen—to create devastatingly powerful explosives will end up being regulated, but he does not think legislation alone can guard against terrorism.

“After 9/11 there was a knee jerk reaction and that will happen again. I would think that they will introduce registration for liquid chemicals that can be used as explosives.

“At the end of the day, there is no way of keeping ahead of terrorists if they get into bombs.” John believes the key is a much deeper understanding of terrorists and their motives. “By the time they’re getting on an aircraft it’s almost too late.”