Technically, jet engines don’t run on explosions, they run on campfires. Instead of a stone ring, they use compressed air to contain the burn.
But from a safety point of view it doesn’t matter much what technology the engine uses. It takes the same tremendous amount of energy to do the work of lifting the plane up, moving it along, and setting it down. It doesn’t matter if its energy is stored in a battery, a gas tank, or a ball of uranium; if some accident lets out all of that energy at once, the results will be disastrous.
By way of example, look at the Mythbusters storage of energy in the form of hot water, and the results when the container fails. And that’s just the puny amount of energy you can suck through an extension cord - it’s barely enough to power a winch that could tow a plane at a few feet per second, not hundreds of miles per hour.
