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Another Plane Down in New York
Another plane has crashed, this time in Queens. You can read a blurb at Yahoo.
CNN.com isn't responding for me. LaGuardia, Newark and JFK are closed now. Update: 11/12 14:54 GMT by T : New reports indicate that the plane was departing from JFK, not arriving. Also, CNN has confirmed that this was American Airlines flight 587, an Airbus A 300. Update: 11/12 14:57 GMT by T : Further information is that the plane was en route to the Dominican Republic, and that the disaster actually involves two crash sites, not just one -- an engine fell from the plane some distance from the fuselage.
Just to let you all know - as off press time for this posting, nobody knows whether this was an accident, or another terrorist attack.
Let's not jump to conclusions.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Did every news site return all the extra servers and bandwidth they acquired during the 9/11 attack? Suddenly I can't get to cnn, yahoo news, and many other sites. What happened to their extra capacity?
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A friend of mine just said "Isn't is horrible that we can now think 'I hope it was just a plane crash' when something like this happens?"
From the location of the crash and proximity to the airport it looks like it might have just been an accident. If not, then it is yet another nail in the terrorist's coffins.
" Airplane crash == terrorist attack"
Excuse me but that is just plain bullshit.
It is actually quite normal for planes to crash every now and then, therefore it is most likely to be an accident.
However, through your statement all you are doing is spreading fear. Simply by doing that you are *helping* terrorists, as spreading fear is (by definition) their main objective.
Stay cool. The chance of getting hit by a terrorist attack is smaller than the chance of getting hit by a 4WD because the driver was so afraid of being hit by a terrorist that he/she was not paying attention.
Given that neither reaction nor inaction will prevent further attacks, which is the better course to take? Consider these points:
- Which course will polarise world opinion, leading previously moderate people to support radical organisations? (Clue: look at Pakistan.)
- Which course will kill innocent people abroad, in addition to those who have already died in the US? (Clue: look at Afghanistan.)
- Which course will perpetuate a cycle of violence and be used to justify further attacks? (Clue: look at the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine.)
Is your desire to feel like you're doing something worth the consequences?I have to say it's a hell of a bad run of luck for AA, though. And the aviation industry in general... I always thought it was a little bit nuts to have jets flying low above dense areas of the city.
246 passengers, plus 9 crew.
The problem is that simply firing a few billion $ worth of ammunition into the Afghan wastelands does not only accomplish nothing, it actually worsens the situation by driving even more desperate people into the hands of the terrorist groups.
Unless we start caring about the causes (Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq etc.) and not simply about the symptoms, we can already mark January 11.
And if this crash wasn't a terrorist attack, but a simple accident, it changes nothing about the underlying facts.
I think you answered your own question.. It's different times now, they call for different procedures.
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...richie - It is a good day to code.
If you really feel this way, let me ask you:
In short, if we are a nation that claims to believe in a set of principles above all else, but we are unwilling to fight for these principles, then we are a nation of hypocrites.
We all need to stop and take a few steps back. The events of the last 2 months have taken this country to the brink of hysteria and back. The mainstream press is in a feeding frenzy. They are reporting any rumor that they can get their hands on, all in the name of boosting ratings. Take a look at the last Presidential election and you will see that the self-control that the press once had has disappeared. We cannot allow their drive for money to turn us into a country full of "Chicken Little's" waiting for the sky to fall.
Stop, take a breath, and realize that things like this happen. If we allow ourselves to continue down this road, we will accomplish what no country on this planet has been able to do, bring the US to its knees. People are paralyzed by fear, and the press is feeding this fear. It is time to stop.
Yes, it is terrible when people die, but it happens everyday. Worrying about it will not change it. I believe we should find the people responsible for terrorist attacks and bring them to justice, but not at the cost of our freedom, which is where we are headed. I have heard more members of the press and the government shouting for "National ID Cards", increased security at all public functions, COMDEX banned bags from the convention floor. All of these steps are doing the terrorist work for them. If we allow these criminals to alter our way of life to the point that we cease to function, or regulate ourselves into and Orwellian nightmare then we may as well lie down and die.
Live you life as you always have. Go to work, raise your kids, spend your money, and be happy until given a legitimate reason not to be. Out of all the posts on this site, how many are from people directly affected by 09/11, who either knew someone who is missing, or has family that lost a loved one. The rest of us need to feel sympathetic to the victims and their families, but we should also feel grateful that we are alive, living in the best country on the planet, and act that way.
I've seen video footage of engine failures resulting in total destruction. The engines don't seperate from the wing. They're designed so that the plane can keep on flying even with total engine destruction.
Total engine destruction is the fan blades seperating. Imagine 100 blades rotating at 1000s of RPMs flying in every direction. The engine case takes the beating without the wing being damaged. The engine is destroyed but the plane keeps flying.
I don't know what this was, but it wasn't like any mechanical failure I've ever heard of.
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There are NO such parachutes. Let's do some real simple calcs. I believe a standard human parachute is 28 feet in diameter, for a human weighing 200 pounds. A fully loaded 747 is around 800,000 pounds, 4000 times as much. Let's see, square root of 4000 is roughly 64, and 64 * 28 = 1770 feet -- ONE KILOMETER!
Are you so nuts as to think that practical?
And do you think it could be deployed at several hundred miles an hour without shredding?
Dropping an egg is one thing, an airline entirely difefrent. A egg has a pretty low terminal air velocity because of the weight per surface area. Comparing this to an airliner is like saying an ant can fall safely, why can't humans? Even cats have a sufficiently low terminal velocity that once they fall past 10 stories or so, they don't fall any faster, and they still don't have a great survival rate. Let's give that cat the density of an airliner and see what happens to the terminal velocity.
Now as to material. The HMS Sheffield DID NOT BURN due to aluminum. It burned because the Exocet has an explosive warhead which scattered and ignited the remaining rocket fuel. It was not a giant inescapable fireball. Jeez, your hyperbole is incredible.
It's easy enough for you to worry about aluminum burning, but what does that have to do with airliners burning? Hey! It's the FUEL that explodes and burns, not the structure! Maybe we should all fly naked too, so our clothes won't contribute to the fire.
As for arbitrarily increasing the weight by getting rid of aluminum, common sense ought to inform you that they use expensive materials for a reason. Don't you think that if they could make heavier cheaper planes that they would? There's no secret airplane cabal conspiring to jack up the prices just to keep the bauxite miners employed. Man, they fret over new seat materials to save a pound per seat.
As for airplane design not being the brightest ideas out there, sounds to me like they've got you beat at any rate.
Infuriate left and right
This might be another way of killing Bin Laden. Right now I figure he's somewhere near laughing himeself to death at this overreaction. Please remamber that plane crashes happen, and this one does not have any of the hallmarks of terrorist action.
all of the security in the world isn't going to stop murphy's law fromm causing the occasional f*ck up. Flying is still safer than driving, but reading the news may cause a heart-attack if you attribute every tragedy to terrorism.
Let investigators do their job. In the unlikely event that they determine this to be of terrrorist cause, then we can take the appropriate actions
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It is actually quite normal for planes to crash every now and then, therefore it is most likely to be an accident.
A good example to support this point is the Sibir Airlines plane that went down in the Black Sea a month ago. Initially it was assumed to be terrorism (especially since the plane departed from Israel). However the consensus is now that it was hit by a stray Ukrainian missile that got away from its test range.
So even though terrorism might be the most likely reason for the New York crash, and the first thing that should be investigated, it is not the only possibility.
I knew something was wrong when I woke up this morning and none of the news sites were picking up. There was this awful ping of complete and total fear where I literally felt my heart fall into stomach... something was wrong.
I ran downstairs and turned on the TV and saw the breaking news. I now know, whenever cnn, msnbc and abcnews ALL don't pick up... and then ny1.com doesn't either... that something awful has happened again in New York.
The September 11th hijackers were, for all practical purposes, "ordinary Americans." Timothy McVeigh was an "ordinary American." How do you tell the "ordinary Americans" from the "evil Hijackers?"
I'm not saying that Federalization is the answer, or even that I'm opposed to CCPs in general, but airplanes are not the place for guns. Federal Marshals with the right ammo, maybe. But even in the right hands, firearms on airplanes are orders of magnitude more dangerous--for all of us--than they are elsewhere. If "ordinary Americans" have to defend themselves on airplanes, they can do it with their hands, and the best we can do is make sure that the potential hijackers are forced to face them on even terms.
No relation to Happy Monkey
This [salon.com]article is saying that GW is now meeting with his advisors about whether or not there is enough of a chance of this being a terrorist attack that it warrants shutting down US airspace again. At this time, they have made no decision on the matter.
My personal thought on the matter is that the only way we are going to know if this was a terrorist attack is:
A) Somebody claims responisbility (not too likely)
B) Another plane goes down
C) The NTSB comes back (after a couple of weeks) and says it was a bomb
It seems to me that the government is either just going to have to wait and see if it happens again before they make that decision OR, they could shut everything down and start searching engines for bombs, but, in light of the fact that there is no evidence that this is terrorist-related, isn't shutting it all down giving in to terrorism?
I really don't understand why this is marked as flamebait. It seems like a genuine post to me, not even particuarly unreasonable.
What most anti-war protestors object to is killing a bunch of people who had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. For instance, it's estimated that 100,000-1,000,000 people will starve as a result of US/UK bombing of Afghanistan. This is not the estimate of those who will starve, it is the difference between the numbers who would have died anyway, and the number who will die now. The assassination of the leaders of those responsible would be just fine with lot's of people who object to the "war" (myself included). Unfortunately this is not very easy to accomplish.
Just a couple of quick questions for you here: how many of the terrorists were Afghans ?
where did the majority of the terrorists come from ?
which country provides most the funding for AlQueada ?
(hint: 0,Saudi-12/18,Saudi)
So, given the above, how many dead civilian Afghanis would be acceptable in your opinion ? Seriously, I'm curious, is it
a) "all of them",
b) 10,000,000-1,000,000
c) 1,000,000-100,000
d) 100,000-10,000
e) 10,000-1,000
f) 1-1000
g) none
Personally, I would opt for (e),(f) or maybe even (d) *if* I was convinced this would prevent another Sept 11 or worse.
And I guess the related question is: for what objectives are you prepare to kill that number of people ?
Would that be acceptable in order to also achieve death of Osama Bin Laden, or OBL + most of Al-Queada, or OBL+AlQueada+Taliban, or what ?
> we need to stop being so... law abiding? moral?
What I'm curious about is where you got the impression that the US was doing those things anyway ? What laws do you think the IS abiding by ? On the moral front, I agree with right to defend oneself, I'm just not convinced that this is what's going on here. Are you starting to feel safer now that some Afghans have been blown up too ? Do you believe this reduces the threat of future terrorist attacks ?
This isn't meant to be rehetorical. I'm just puzzled. I'll answer hawksish questions in response if mine are answered.
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What an incredibly naive statment. When a fanatic wants to kill you, talking to him to "end the cycle of violence" only gives him more opportunities to kill you. When Hitler tried to take over the world, did we try to stop the "cycle of violance" by talking to him? HELL NO! We responded with force. We killed the enemy. That's how you end the cycle of violence.
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OK. So that makes it sound like a terrorist, but not so fast...
Here is my logic: A high explosive device that was able to tear the wing off would have caused some pretty spectacular effects and not caused the fires that were seen. So it was probably not a high explosive.
Low explosives are not much more of a candidate either-- it would be really hard to make a dangerous LE device on a plane.
However, there is a class of explosives that would work-- high blast pressures, fires, and low ranges: fuel-air explosives, or FAE's. Note that the fuel has to go through the wing to the engine, so it has to go into the wing. If there was a leak, an explosion could have caused everything that was seen.
So I think that a fuel leak around the junction of the wing was responsible along with a spark, excess heat, or something. So one is back to accident or sabotage.
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