Color me skeptical. No traces of explosives were found in the accident investigation. What they did find was a serious flaw in pilot training - that the use of full rudder deflecion even below maneuvering speed could result in structural failure.

Maneuvering speed is the airspeed below which full control deflection is not supposed to cause structural damage. At least, that's what we were taught. It turns out this isn't true except for positive g loads, primarily in pitch. Full rudder deflections can exceed the vertical stabilizer's design ratings.

The accident investigation showed that the copilot (who was flying the plane) used heavy rudder inputs when the plane encountered wake turbulence from a preceeding 747. A shoe bomber would not have caused the vertical stabilizer failure seen in the crash.

After 9/11, many pilots planned on using heavy control inputs to disrupt any hijack attempt. Had they done so, they might've caused the same kind of damage. It turned out that the simulators used for pilot training didn't accurately model this control limitation.

After this accident, special notices were sent out to airline pilots warning them of the danger of using heavy rudder inputs even below maneuvering speed.

I remember that crash, and the temporal proximity to 9/11 made for some obvious assumptions until we had more information. But no explosives were found in the wreckage, and the blackbox showed the real problem, as Larry outlines above.

Really, this comes back to Saddam Hussein personally helping Tim McVeigh make the OK City bomb, or whatever that nutty tinfoil hat theory was. Had the government had any little tiny shred of flimsy evidence whatsoever to link terrorists to AA 587, they would have been on it like white on rice. The fact that they came out and said "no terrorists here" is a very credible statement given that fact, and I have no reason to disbelieve it.

And if that's not enough, read again the account of Richard Reid trying to set light a fuse sticking out the back of his shoe. That seems like a simple task for anyone (and granted, Reid doesn't exactly seem to have an Einsteinian intellect), yet he was unable to complete it because the other passengers were on him like a swarm of bees. How much more alert were the other passengers just a month after 9/11?

It's game over for airplanes and terrorists in the US, we know it and they know it. It doesn't mean we don't need to remain vigilant, but the next strike will have to exploit another weak point. Our obsession with air travel will potentially blind us to other, more obvious threats.