"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."
spot on.
And if you have a couple of hundred people on board - it is one thing to pinch the cargo and another thing to kill lots of people ---------------
BUT, if you can pull of one of the biggest robberies in history AND look after the people --
you get rich AND become a folk hero.
The only one's who are pissed off with you are the authorities and the insurance that has to pay out.
If this is the case - these people will go down in history - crikey Ronald Biggs got famous and all he did was arrange the train driver - who couldn't drive the bloody thing anyway - then Biggs got done and then escaped.
