BDiONU
You are not the first to question this article – previously, I had drawn the attention of the journalist to this site and the comments relevant to his article – similarly, I have taken the liberty of sending him the text of your recent post and asking for him to make a comment.
The problem is that the article was written a long time ago and his source did not want to be named – all I can say is that the journalist appears to be of some standing in his profession and his source (he has convinced me at least) was a man who was in a position to know what he was talking about.
Let us not forget why I referred to this article at all: I had asked the question, one way or another, what was the ACTUAL observed or otherwise known SSR code being used by ZD576 - as opposed to what it SHOULD have been – in the period before it was in trouble; a sensible starting point for discussing how it came to be 7760, I would have thought.
I asked, in various ways, if anyone could recall it being referred to anywhere or if recordings of the radar track could be checked (secondary, obviously).
While all replies so far have been negative the early ones were strangely simplistic, for example referring to facilities at Aldergrove or Prestwick aerodrome – no one mentioned early on the control centre at Prestwick (Atlantic House?) where I knew many remote stations fed back to and which is where I thought it was most likely that ZD576 may have been observed. It was then that I recalled the article in question and tracked down the author who confirmed that his source had indeed been at the Prestwick center – and that the source had not observed real time but saw a recording.
What a strange impasse.
All we want to know is what the SSR code ACTUALLY was before the a/c got into trouble – what was it observed to be transponding anywhere along that route or was anything written down anywhere.