RON BROWN: SIGNS THE PLANE WAS SABOTAGED.

First off, the claims made in both TIME and NEWSWEEK that Ron Brown's plane crashed in the "worst storm in a decade" are directly contradicted by the weather report issued by the Dubrovnik Airport Tower adjacent to the crash site. The storm simply did not exist.

While the plane carrying Ron Brown and his party was still 7 miles from the crash site, 1/2 mile in the air and on the normal approach path, three radio based links with three separate propagation paths all failed at the same time.

According to the Aviation Week & Space Technology article, the Dubrovnik tower lost voice radio contact at the same time the aircraft vanished from the screens of the approach radar at Split and an AWACS.

Let's look at the Split radar first.

The Split radar watches the approach to Dubrovnik airport, which is where the Ron Brown aircraft was when it dropped off of the radar screen. Contrary to some silly claims made in this newsgroup before, the plane was NOT flying in the mountains. It was out over the water, with open space all around. The radar at Split routinely tracks aircraft through that airspace without problem. If it were normal for the Split radar to lose traffic at that point on the approach path, nobody would have mentioned it because it would be normal and expected behavior. Nothing unusual about it. That comment was made about the target dropping off of the Split radar establishes that it was an unusual event.

The Split radar, like all ATC radar, tracks primarily by aircraft transponder. So, when the Split radar lost track of the Ron Brown aircraft, what was lost was the transponder return, as the aircraft was still on the approach path, although just starting to veer slightly left.

Now let's look at the AWACS.

The AWACS system is designed to track NON-transpondered targets. Radar "hits" are placed in a computer system that keeps a list and tries to match the returns from the present radar sweep to the returns from the previous sweeps in order to generate meaningful target tracking data for the operators and weapons management systems. Part of that process involves target to target comparisons to make certain that what the computer thinks is target XYZ this sweep is the same target it thought was XYZ last sweep. The total workload on the computer is a power function of the total number of non-transpondered targets being carried in the target list.

If a target has a transponder, the AWACS will track the target using the transponder return, because not only is less computer power needed for a transpondered target, but the workload for non-transpondered targets is reduced.

How do we know that the AWACS was tracking the Ron Brown plane via transponder? Because the AWACS lost it's track at the same time that the Split radar lost it's transponder return. Had the AWACS been tracking the Ron Brown plane via skin-paint, there is no reason for it to lose track of the aircraft at the same time that Split did.

Had the AWACS not reported losing contact, we could surmise that either the AWACS was tracking on skin paint or the Split radar suffered a momentary failure, but this was not the case.

It is also true that the AWACS could have immediately reacquired the Ron Brown aircraft on skin paint (and it's not known for a fact that the computers did not add it as a non-transpondered target), but the AWACS was there to watch Bosnia, not the Dubrovnik airport.

The two radar tracks, propagating along two different paths, come together at only one common point where a single failure could make the aircraft vanish from both Split and the AWACS, and that is the radar transponder in the Ron Brown aircraft. A failure of the transponder is the only explanation for the Ron Brown plane vanishing from two different radar screens at the same time, while still 7 miles from the crash site and 1/2 mile above the Adriatic sea.

At the same time that the aircraft vanished from the radars at Split and the AWACS, the Dubrovnik tower reported it lost voice radio contact with the aircraft.

This is a third distinct propagation path from the AWACS and Split. In fact, it's direct line of sight from the Dubrovnik tower to the location on the approach path where radio contact was lost. There are no intervening geological features to block the radio signal. The Dubrovnik tower continued to communicate with other aircraft in the area, so the radios in the tower were not at fault.

The data reported in the Aviation Week & Space Technology article shows evidence that TWO SPERATE SYSTEMS on board the Ron Brown aircraft failed at the same time. The cockpit radios, and the radar transponder.

The radios and radar transponders come together at only one common point where a single failure could make the aircraft vanish from both Split and the AWACS AND lose voice radio contact with the Dubrovnik tower, and that is is the electrical system failed in mid air, while still 7 miles from the crash site and 1/2 mile above the Adriatic sea, on the approach path.

No other explanation fits the facts reported in Aviation Week & Space Technology.