"I doubt that something of extreme value to justify such a robbery would have been shipped on a commercial passenger plane in any case, but rather on some special high security flight with armed guards at the delivery and loading and on board the flight..."
Exactly why they don't do that, as no one suspects that anything valuable is on a commercial passenger flight.
Flights home to Perth used to carry, at times, over $500,000 worth of gold, and I remember thinking how easy to 'down' one of these planes and steal the gold.
