Originally Posted by
sophia8
The IRA used a 28-day timer for the Brighton bomb - and that was in 1984. Finding an accurate long-range timer would have been no problem in 1997.
ETA: ARGH; That should be 1988, 0f course.
I'd forgotten about that one. I suppose it's peripheral, but the complexity of the detonation timing seems unnecessary. If you know you're going to get the bomb on the plane, then just set the timer to go off as late as possible before the plane will get to the other side of the Atlantic, assuming that it's up to time (or as far ahead of time as might realistically happen). Then, if it's late (which let's face it is more likely), it will still probably have cleared land when it detonates. I'm not sure how big a window that is, but I'd have thought it was big enough.
In any event, all that messing around with pressure sensors doesn't seem to have conferred any advantage, because the delay on the tarmac at Heathrow still led to a detonation over land, regardless.
I've just got one idea, which would depend on the bag being put on board on Malta. Suppose you don't know for sure which connecting flight the bag will be transferred to at Frankfurt. Then, the pressure sensor would make sense. It would confirm that the bag was actually on the plane which would cross the Atlantic, and that the journey had begun.
Someone said, well in that case why not start the timer on the
third takeoff (from Heathrow) rather than the second one (from Frankfurt). Doing that would pretty much guarantee that the desired point in the journey would be hit. My guess on that one would be that perhaps that was one complication too far, and in fact the terrorists didn't care all that much whether the plane landed on British soil or not.
I don't know if this has ever been discussed in relation to any of the prevalent theories.
Rolfe.