Slashdot Mirror
Mystery 'Missile' Identified As US Airways Flight 808
sean.peters writes "The mystery missile discussed on Slashdot Tuesday? It was US Airways 808 from Honolulu to Phoenix. An amateur sleuth checked the time against airline schedules, then the following day, checked out a webcam that was trained in the appropriate direction. He found the exact same contrail at the time AWE808 was coming over. The author deals persuasively with a number of objections to his argument."
My explanation of "It's another water heater from Mythbusters" was far more entertaining.
--
BMO
He's a part of the conspiracy. It's a cover-up, and I will argue it as such for decades to come. Because that's the only thing that makes sense.
Deny deny deny. Obfuscate and confuse the issue. Introduce an alternative theory. Have "independent" expert validate alternative theory. Never admit truth. Wait for public to forget incident.
It works all the time.
I wonder if that UN Ambassador feels silly about his comment that it was probably a display of power aimed at asian nations... Why would the military perform a missile launch to beat their chest then deny that they did it? XD This news is going to be devastating to conspiracy theorists. No wait, denial and facts fuel that fire, nevermind.
check out the Mp3 Garbler I built!
The picture fooled me, too.
And I ignored myself when I wondered why the plume wasn't all twisted up. Missile trails go through the different layers of atmosphere and pull in different directions. Like this:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/09/17/article-1214076-06756E3E000005DC-858_306x438.jpg
Why? Simple. It's more fun that way. There is NO excitement in the version saying it's a damned routine flight. That version is a national security threat. Millions of people will die as a result. Of boredom.
Therefore, it was a missile. Chinese. Communist party. War tensions abound. Obama is negotiating terms with Hu Jintao at this very moment, supposedly over the econonomic issues. Saving millions, billions even! from certain death.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
No. They shut it down because they don't want us to know the truth - Google was ^%$_)&*(
NO CARRIER
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
from blog.bahneman.com:
[Update: CBS2 in New York has a story about a similar event over NYC November 10]
I wonder if I'm the first to call it, the reported unexplained missile launch off the coast of California, was US Airways 808.
I did a lot of extrapolation of what flights could be at the right position (off the coast) at the right altitude (for contrail formation) and came down to two possibilities: UPS flight 902 (UPS902) or US Airways flight 808 (AWE808).
As I was researching tonight (24 hours later), I realized that today's AWE808 current position (at around 4:50pm) was almost the same as it was the day of the incident. I quickly pulled up a Newport Beach webcam and found tha (apparently) AWE808 was making an identical contrail, 24 hours later!
Picture 6.png
Compare the above webcam image to the KCBS footage:
Picture 12.png
The comparison is quite clear. A remarkably similar, less-hyped, contrail created by the same flight almost exactly 24 hours later!
So, based on that, and the flight track of AWE808 24 hours earlier, I believe the mysterious missile off the coast of California on November 8, 2010, was in fact the contrail of US Airways flight 808, a flight originating in Honolulu , HI (PHNL) and ending in Phoenix (KPHX).
Picture 7.png
I'm about 80% certain this is the right flight, though UPS902 is still a contender.
For some additional explanation of this non-event, take a look at the Contrail Science blog.
Other theories I've seen that explain this:
* Accidental missile launch
* Target for Airborne Anti-missle Laser Test
* Chinese-made Russian-designed ICBM
* Russian/Korean/American/Chinese "Show of strength" during Obama's tour of Asia
* Chemtrails
* Submarine-launched missile
* F-22
I respect that people will see what they want to see, particularly when it lines up with their interest. Military missile men will see a missile. Conspiracy fans will see a conspiracy. Military pilots will see an fighter jet. Myself? I'm an aviation photographer who also dabbles in weather and atmospheric phenomena. So I see a commercial airliner and its contrail, however, I also believe that this is an excellent example of Occam's Razor: "the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one."
There are a number of variables involved here:
* Altitude, exact time of day, direction and magnification of the KCBS news helicopter footage
* Direction and field of view of the Newport Beach webcam
* Exact positions of AWE808 or UPS902 when the video was made
With those variables nailed down, in conjunction with the sun angle, an expert should be able to pinpoint exactly, the trajectory of the object. Meteor experts extrapolate this kind of information on almost a daily basis in their tracking of meteor or satellite debris entering our atmosphere.
Some commonly commented concepts
(My responses to these are my opinion. I'm not a meteorologist or aerospace engineer).
- The "base" of the contrail is too wide, it should be narrower, like a road as it leads to the distance
You would naturally make that assumption. However, a contrail, at 39,000 feet is often subject to high winds. Depending on the velocity and direction, it can spread out contrails in a matter of minutes. (These contrails often turn into feathery cirrus clouds.) The contrail created at the distance where it appears to meet the horizon has had sufficient time to spread out with the wind. Remember, the distance as viewed through a zoom lens appears to be shorter due to an optical affect called "foreshortening".
- The object clearly had a bright, solid rocket-like engine flare
I attribute this to the sun reflecting off th
It's called a horizon and Phoenix is "EAST" of Hawaii.
I was going to say this would been much easier if the Plane Finder AR iphone and android app wasn't labeled "an aid to terrorists" and removed from app stores, but it looks like you can still get it. There's a web version too at www.planefinder.net
I think one aspect of this story that hasn't been mentioned is the fact that daylight savings time kicked in the previous day. So, let's say this is a regular weekday flight that arrives in Phoenix in the early evening. After the November 7th "fall back" daylight savings time change, this flight, which may have passed over L.A. in bright daylight on Friday November 5th, is now illuminated on Monday November 8th with dramatic dusk lighting, resulting in a very different looking contrail.
Wish there are more such amateurs tracking the money and misinformation spread by everyone about politics.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because some people value their credibility, perhaps?
"I don't care who said it was a plane flight"
The battle cry of the uninformed conspiracy theorist...
Sometimes, they merge very quickly into a single contrail, and his argument is that this is the case, and the angle at which the photo was shot at doesn't allow you to see them merge.
I've never seen an airplane contrail look like that before.
I have. I live in Central CA, which is the "flyover country" of CA. You can see planes going between various West coast destinations every few minutes. When a plane is coming directly towards you, the curvature of the sky and the altitude of the plane make it appear that the plane is shooting straight up. It's an optical illusion.
I've seen contrails that look exactly like the "missile" in question, as they were being created.
I've also seen actual missile tests that originated from the coast, and they sure as hell didn't look like that.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers."
Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.
This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/03/report-recruit/
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Do you know how the radars track things? Do you know how the data is stored an analyzed? Do you know what procedures are in place for answering civilian inquiries on this? If you don't know, and it is clear you don't, then why should it be "easy"?
What you are doing more or less is arguing from ignorance, you are doing the same shit stupid managers to do IT and developers all over: "I don't understand how this works so I assume it is easy, and I get mad that you cannot deliver it to me easily and quickly." You know fuck-all about what you are talking about, so you just assume it should be "easy" and that they are either incompetent or evil because they won't just pop off an answer straight away.
Some very reasoned (and funny) commentary on it came from The Daily Show (sad because we shouldn't have to have a comedy show that is better than real news). The CBS chopper filmed the plane for 10 minutes. As Jon Stewart notes ballistic missiles go really fast, like 9,000 miles an hour. That's rather the point of missiles, they go really fast. Even little ones like Sidewinders are extremely high speed but the big ones like SLBMs are just amazingly fast. If they weren't, well they'd be real easy to shoot down, which would kinda eliminate their usefulness. Also there'd be plenty of time to have warning and deal with them.
If this was a big missile it was the slowest missile in history.