dc - Were there any other options for taking out the plane?

In Wonder Woman film, There's a relatively large plane in the closing minutes of the film that needs to be stopped.

While I did catch the throwaway line about the payload being on timers, why couldn't Steve Trevor have landed it in a totally desolate/abandoned place or even ditched in a nearby large body of water?

Answer

The novelisation of the film indicates that his actions were motivated by a lack of understanding about the plane's capabilities and an excess of caution that the plane might crash near to a populated area, noting that the price for failure was potentially millions of innocent lives.

He also seems worried that if he crashes near the ground, that the cloud of poison gas would remain cohesive enough to kill if it blew back over land.

Gathering speed from the powerful tailwind, Steve pulled back on the yoke, putting the plane into a steep climb. He reached out and tapped the fuel tank gauges with a fingernail. The needles read full. How far from civilization could he get? Could he make it out over the Atlantic? Or would the heavy payload drain the fuel so quickly that he’d crash land on the coast of France? He couldn’t come up short, not with so many lives on the line.
The wind ripped at the plane as it continued to climb, buffeting it so violently that the wings flexed and rippled.
An idea popped into his head. If he could climb high enough into the storm, reach the maximum wind stream, if the gas was released then, it would disperse over hundreds, maybe thousands of miles. It would be so diluted that it would be rendered harmless. Pushing the throttles forward to full power, he tried to look out the window but there was no way to see anything. How was Diana doing?

_{^{Wonder-Woman: Official Movie Novelisation}}