Boeing 747 Survives Simulated 'Underwear Bomb' Explosion (VIDEO)

What if the 'Christmas Day' bomber's explosive device had been successfully detonated on the now-infamous December flight to Detroit?

The explosion of the 'underwear bomb' carried aboard flight 253 by would-be suicide bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was simulated recently on a decommissioned Boeing 747.

The experiment suggests that had Abdulmutallab succeeded in detonating the explosive he brought on the flight, the plane would still have been able to land safely.

The test bomb detonation took place at an airplane graveyard in England and as part of a BBC Two documentary, 'How Safe Are Our Skies? Detroit Flight 253'.

To conduct the bombing experiment, experts put a dummy equipped with the same quantity and type of explosive used by Abdulmutallab on board a Boeing 747 airplane.

The BBC reports the findings from the simulation:

A test explosion on a Boeing 747 has shown that a US Christmas Day flight would have landed safely even if a bomb on board was detonated successfully.

The plane's fuselage did not break in the controlled blast, which used the same explosives that were on Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

However experts said it showed the suspected bomber and the passenger next to him would have been killed.

See the simulated bomb blast in the video below.