Sunfish,
I don't wish to question either your contacts or your very interesting information about what is going the rounds in the insurance business. But we must distinguish between effects that obey the general laws of terrestial electromagnetic physics, and magic.
Originally Posted by Sunfish
....... getting way beyond my competence, there is stuff apparently being used in Iraq to defeat electrically detonated IED's. GPS can also be jammed,
You are right about both of those. It is well known how easy it is to jam GPS signals. I suspect you can buy jammers for a couple hundred dollars at most. It is also well known (if one reads Aviation Week, for example) that the military in Iraq is deploying electronic warfare devices to disrupt IED control. However, both these phenomena consist of disturbing radio signals. Causing a disturbance in well-shielded on-board electronics from a point at least many hundreds of feet away is something else entirely.
To employ an analogy I have used before: it is one thing to ruin the picture on a television set by turning on your vacuum cleaner; it would be something else entirely to get your vacuum cleaner to change the channels.
If there was any EMI coming from outside the aircraft, it remains to be explained how it can have happened without leaving any trace at all in the highly-instrumented and recorded electrical and electronic control systems of the aircraft. If you explode a grenade sufficient to collapse your garden shed, it leaves a hole. No one would mistake such an event for, say, your shed collapsing spontaneously. Exactly the same is true of electromagnetic radiation. And the AAIB has said they have seen no control anomalies on the recordings.
Originally Posted by Sunfish
we are not talking about jamming the whole of London either, merely about 500 feet, I would guess, around a moving vehicle.
We are not talking about jamming, period.
Originally Posted by Sunfish
As for lloyds, yes they are merely insurers, but the have an infinitely subtle and world wide intelligence network made up of every name on the floor.
I take it that none of the members of this infinitely subtle and world wide intelligence network, or any of their friends, has yet seen fit to spread a rumor of a physically plausible causal mechanism by which this disturbance may have occurred.
PBL