Comments on the episodes of this superior series are liable to look repetitious because they all follow the same template: (1) disaster, (2) investigation, and (3) solution. Yet each is different, both in the subject and in the treatment it receives.
A Philippine Air Lines flight en route Tokyo is proceeding normally until, in mid-ocean, a bomb explodes under one of the passengers' seats. The occupant is killed and several others are wounded but the cabin remains intact.
The pilots have difficulty in reaching an airport at Okinawa because some of the controls are cut but they do manage to land safely. The investigation of the cause takes little time. A simple but fiendishly clever time bomb was fixed under one of the seats by a passenger who left the airplane before it took off on its last flight. The perp was a technical genius. The bomb consisted of a rather large container of Visine, an eye freshener, containing stabilized nitroglycerine. Nitroglycerine is tricky. I once secluded myself in a closet and began to heat a mixture that would produce nitrous oxide in order to get high, but under some conditions you wind up with nitroglycerine instead so I quit. Anyway, the bomber concealed part of the detonation stuff in the hollow heal of his shoe and used an ordinary watch for a timer.
That was simple. Then the program turns into something resembling The FBI Files or Cold Case Files, the tracking down of the bomber. He's eventually arrested by Pakistani police and it develops that the explosion on Philippine Airlines was merely a test for a much more ambitious plan to blow up four American jumbo jets at the same time, in retaliation for America's support of Israel. The unrepentant killer was sentenced to life in a maximum security prison in Colorado.
