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Tom Clancy, "Debt of Honor", wasn't too far off. Disgruntled pilot rather than hijackers, one plane into the Capitol building rather than 4 planes into assorted targets, but it obviously conveyed "a jumbo jet full of fuel is a dangerous missile", and it was the 7th book in a best-selling series that had already been adapted into 3 blockbuster movies.
It was the weapon delivery system in the OKC bombing, but yeah, not the weapon.
I've always half-wondered why truck attacks didn't become a more serious threat. It seemed so trivially easy and moderately effective that in the wake of Nice I expected it to become just another Thing that happens regularly. Wikipedia doesn't even list more than a handful of copycats.
IIRC this still holds even if you have a very loose definition of "terrorist"; the "contagious" timing of school shootings suggests that the kinds of assholes who try to become infamous for shooting up a school are much more likely to do so if there's been another famous school shooting recently, as if even though the idea is hardly a secret at this point they don't really take it seriously until they see a de-facto commercial for another one on the news.
I do also think there might be something to the theory
The black trench coats and guns at Columbine were like an evil echo of The Matrix protagonists superhumanly fighting The Man, whereas simply running people over feels like something that could be accomplished by an elderly person confusing the gas and brake pedals. They say that "nobody thinks they're the villain of their own story", but also nobody even wants to think they're just a half-competent mook in their own story, so perhaps when they do slip into villainy they try to make it dramatic. The sort of utilitarian who deduces that you can massacre more people with a car than a gun might also generally be the sort who deduces that massacring a bunch of people doesn't actually accomplish any of your real goals anyway.
The X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen had an episode in early 2001 about the government perpetrating a fake terrorist attack by crashing an airliner into the World Trade Center, in order to have an excuse to go to war with half the Middle East. It’s on YouTube, but interestingly it has never made it to any streaming platforms.
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