Delta: You'll Love the Way We Fly...and Thwart Terrorists

Busy year for Delta. They buy Northwest airlines and then almost get blown to bits, Richard Reid style, by some crazed Nigerian trying his very bestest to impress the Al Qaeda recruiters he's just positive have been checking out his mad terror skills.

Fortunately for everyone aboard Northwest flight 253 en route from Amsterdam to Detroit, his best wasn't quite good enough.

So this character, a 23-year-old rich, pretty boy named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, already on the government's no-fly list (glad to see how well that's working out) and soon to be on Al Qaeda's no-use list, reportedly told investigators that Al Qaeda instructed him to detonate the explosives once over U.S. soil using a substance he acquired from Yemen that he taped to his leg to later mix with a syringe of chemicals that together with the powder would go ka-boom!

Ugh, he was thisclose too! Seriously, he was right on schedule, everything was going perfectly to plan, and just as he was about to make the plane land in Detroit in a million fiery pieces, some nosy passengers smelled smoke and heard what sounded like firecrackers, giving the impression that he wasn't simply wishing them a Merry Christmas Nigerian style, but rather a hot and violent death 20,000 ft above ground. Ho-ho-ho!

Good thing the quick-thinking travelers around Abdulmutallab heard enough popping, crackling and sizzling for their liking and quickly pounced on the incompetent bastard before he finally got around to figuring out how to successfully combust in order to please Allah.

With his plan foiled, the burned and tattered would-be jihadist was politely escorted (ha ha just kidding the psycho was tossed like a ragdoll) off the plane and into police custody where, after a the slightest FBI interrogation, he promptly divulged his top-secret plot to incinerate scores of civilians and thus screw 72 virgins for blissful eternity.

Passenger Jasper Schuringa, who was the first on the plane to tackle and subdue the suspect, said, "I basically reacted directly. When you hear a pop on the plane, you are awake. I just jumped. I didn't think, I just went over there and tried to save the plane – and we did."

Schuringa, who had burns to one of his hands, added, "A fire started under his seat. I was calling for water, water. But then the fire was getting a little worse. So I grabbed the suspect out of the seat, because, if there was any more explosives on him, that would have been very dangerous. And then the flight attendants came. We took him to first class and stripped him to make sure he had no more weapons on him."

"He was shaking. He didn't resist anything. It's just hard to believe that he was trying to blow up this plane. He was in a trance. He was very afraid."

You would be too if all of a sudden you realized you wouldn't be going to virgin heaven but a slightly less enticing paradise, Guantanamo Bay (Hey, Gitmo can still be fun, no?) or if you're really lucky, the winter wonderland of Thompson, Illinois.

Even scarier, he won't even have Daddy's credit cards to use anymore!!

Bet someone wishes he had done a little less praying and a little more paying attention in chemistry class over at University College London. Oops.

Instead, the only thing going Boom Boom Pow is the Black Eyed Peas song on his iPod.