I'm reading Emerson and Duffy (
The Fall of Pan Am 103, published 1990) at the moment, and this thing about the flight being late seems to become a meme really early.
At 6.00 P.M., its scheduled departure time, Flight 103, the clipper Maid of the Seas, had been pushed back from Heathrow's newly remodelled Terminal 3. Under its own power, it had begun taxiing toward the airport's main east-west runways to await a takeoff slot from the air traffic controllers in the tower. Heathrow is typically a mess at that time of night, with too many planes coming and going. Many evenings, the 103 to New York is held up on the taxiway. It had happened again tonight, the result a twenty-five-minute delay. [....]
Since he had arrived in Lockerbie, Boyd had been given more information about the Pan Am flight. He had learned of the twenty-five-minute delay at Heathrow. A student of police work, Boyd had recalled the downing of an Air-India jet some years earlier. Sikh terrorists had placed he bomb on board in Vancouver, but it had not detonated until it was over water. No one was ever prosecuted.
"If Flight 103 had left Heathrow on time," Boyd said later, "it would have blown up in the sky over the Atlantic, and there would have been no evidence."
This is so full of wrong I hardly know where to start. The flight was scheduled to depart (that is, push off from the stand) at 6pm. Its wheels didn't leave the runway until 6.25pm. Correct. That means it was 25 minutes late? What are these guys smoking?
This reasoning implies that normally, planes magically levitate into the air the very minute they push off from the stand. We
know that doesn't happen. Richard Dawson, the air traffic controller at Heathrow, was asked about this at Zeist.
Q Can you tell us, please, what the average time is that an aircraft might take from leaving the gate to being airborne?
A It very much depends on where the gate is in relation to the departure runway. But on average you can say a minimum of 15 minutes and a maximum of 25 -- 20 to 25. But it also depends how many aircraft there are taxiing for departure at any one time.
So, common sense tells us that an aircraft takes some time to become airborne after pushing off from the stand at its scheduled time. ATC confirms this to be at least 15 minutes, with 25 minutes still within the normal range. Emerson and Duffy even say, while they're trying to claim that the on-time PA103 was 25 minutes late, that it was commonplace for the flight to be "held up on the taxiway". What do they think they're trying to say?
Then, even agreeing that this is being said before the words "Khreesat" or "barometric timer" have been uttered, why does anyone think this is a sensible line of argument? This wasn't a quick inter-island hop, it was a flight of SEVEN AND A HALF HOURS. E&D (and John Boyd) think it's perfectly reasonable to set a timing device for only an
hour after the scheduled departure time, on the assumption that it will inevitably sprint off the blocks (even though it usually doesn't), and be "in the sky over the Atlantic" by then? Really?
Look at the bloody flight path, people! The orange dot is Lockerbie.
Whether it had been 10 minutes earlier or 25 minutes earlier, there is no chance at all that that plane would have been "over the Atlantic" at 7.03pm.
But hey, that wasn't the most usual flight path for transatlantic jets to JFK. Most of them take a course closer to the Great Circle route, over Ireland. This one took the more northerly course that night because of the weather. Here's the commoner course.
Might have dropped in the Irish Sea. Maybe. That would have been split-second timing though, and the long debris trail would still have been largely over Wales. No way would it have been "over the Atlantic" on that course either.
Now look at the full length of the most common route to JFK.
On what planet does it make any sense at all to set a timer for the first hour of the flight time?
And yet we get this rubbish about the terrorists expected the plane to vanish over the ocean, and that's why they were careless about the labels on the clothes and so on.... Even the BBC
Conspiracy Files programme, which seemed to figure out that a plane scheduled to depart at 6pm and getting its wheels off the runway at 6.25pm isn't "25 minutes late", still claimed it was ten minutes late, and that made all the difference, another ten minutes and it would have crossed the coastline....
The plane WASN'T LATE. And even if it had got away as early as was humanly possible, it couldn't have been over the Atlantic, on that course. Nor could it have been over the Atlantic on the Shannon (Ireland) course. Look at that huge expanse of ocean that was in front of it. Hours and hours.
But we're supposed to believe there's nothing at all strange about the time of the explosion?
Rolfe.
