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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.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
This article does not seem to suggest *where* they got this FAA Information. Secondly, the FAA never makes the call this fast. The most they might say is "it appears to have been engine trouble" and that would be information they got from the pilots through tower contact. And, even if it *is* engine problems, it doesn't rule out sabatoge, or explosives.
Since the latest reports seem to suggest that there was a mid-air explosion before the plane came down, people might be interested in reading this notice from the FAA requiring that modifications be performed on Airbus A300 series aircraft in order to eliminate a possible cause of fuel tank explosion. Judging by the dates on the notice -- effective September 10, modifications must be performed within 18 months -- I'd guess that many planes haven't been modified yet.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Soo... how come no one's talking about Stingers yet? Is everyone taking those 5-point don't-jump-to-conclusions posts seriously? Gimme a break, those are karma whores, through and through. Speculation is where the fun is.
Here's something to think about, even if it turns out to be completely unrelated to what happened today: the resistance against the Soviets had shoulder-launched SAMs. They were trained how to use them, and used them effectively.
Commercial aircraft take off on very predictable routes. It should be pretty easy to find an optimum firing position within a few miles of an airport, and park your car. You can study the pattern for weeks if you like. Then a plane goes right over your, you open the trunk, take out your Stinger, and shoot the slow-moving low-altitude plane (with nice hot engines at full takeoff power) in the back.
Total security checkpoints you had to go through: zero, except when you smuggled the US-made SAM back into the country. (Or maybe you can even make your own right here -- the Sidewinder budget in the 50s was supposedly really low, and stuff that was cheap in the 50s is nearly free today). And you can do the shooting so fast, there might not even be any witnesses.
Defending against that sort of thing is going to be tricky.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Folks,
:-(
While a lot of people a angling towards the idea of a terrorist action, I think there's one possibility that no one has yet discussed: mechanical failure caused by a catastrophic bird strike.
Far-fetched? Not if you know something about the geography and ecology at JFK Airport and Jamaica Bay. To the west and south of JFK Airport is a very large marshy area that serves as a sanctuary for migratory birds (plus some native waterfowl). This means at this time of the year--when birds are migrating south for the winter--there will be millions of birds out in this sanctuary.
What happens when you have flocks of birds rising by the thousands getting in the way of the flight path of an airliner taking off out into Jamaica Bay? My guess is that American Airlines Flight 857 may have flown in to a very large flock of birds just after take off, mean the plane's two GE CF6-80 engines may be ingested 40 or more birds per engine somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds. That many birds being ingested will seriously damage the front engine blades, and such a severe bird ingestion may be enough to cause a catastrophic fan section failure, which can spew out very sharp engine fan blades at supersonic speeds, possibly breaking through the engine nacelle and hitting the fuselage, wing flap control lines and wing fuel tanks, which explains the fire on the wings that eyewitnesses saw.
Eyewitnesses said that the plane flew very low before the plane lost one of its engines and then crashed down at a sharp angle. This sounds consistent with the plane suffering a catastrophic bird strike.
If anyone remembers, some years ago an E-3A Sentry AWACS plane crashed aftering taking off from Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage, AK after the engines failed due to a catastrophic bird ingestion problem. AA Flight 857 may have suffered a similar unfortunate fate.