Originally Posted by
Rolfe
Just one more mystery I suppose. Though how would your plan be varied if you were putting the bag on in Malta, to a feeder flight, from which it would then be transferred to the transatlantic airliner (maybe you're not 100% sure which one?) at Frankfurt, and the transatlantic flight would make a stopover at Heathrow before heading out over the ocean?
I can see the desire to get the timing started from a later leg, but if they were going to do that, why not home in on the actual transatlantic leg itself, rather than starting the timer on the Frankfurt leg?
That puzzles me too. Ktesibios is absolutely right that that technology already existed (I only would have said 7490 instead of 4017 - I fiddled a bit with an earlier generation IC's in the begin of the 80s
).The prosecution claimed that the timer was triggered on the
second leg of the journey - from Frankfurt to Heathrow - gaining height. So that means that between the pressure sensor and the timer there's a counter that counts how many times the pressure sensor has triggered before it triggers the timer into action. If you can count to 2, you can also count to 3.
Another thing that puzzles me is the timing. The plane exploded over land because it was delayed. However, the delay was only 25 minutes according to
wiki. That means that even if the flight had been on schedule, it would barely have left the Scottish air, or not, falling down somewhere on the Outer Hebrides. As you said before, if you want the plane to go down over the Atlantic, you'd rather plan the detonation for just before the time it would reach North America, as planes never depart too early but frequently too late.