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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."
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!
So I'm assuming you'll provide a decent, sane way to falsify your hypothesis? Or are you just going to reject every amount of data as possibly (sorry, I meant obviously) being tainted by THEM and part of your scary scary conspiracy?
Except that you can verify. You can look up the what time this flight left. You can use a bit of deductive reasoning, a little bit of knowledge about flight paths, and the publicly available Standard Instrument Departures for the given airport to figure out an approximate location and altitude that the plane would be at a given time. You can even, apparently, if the summary is accurate, look back at random webcams that were pointing in the right direction at the right time to see if the plane is there and leaving a contrail.
So yeah, if you believe that the government can create that good of a cover story with that much independent evidence in a 36 hour period, well, you have more faith in government agencies than I do.
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
That's the bizarre thing - why did it take 36 hours to get an answer and why didn't the definitive answer come from a definitive source?
So it was flight 808. Either the DoD and FAA were unable to figure that out in short order or else they just don't care about giving the public answers to those kind of questions.
Neither one of those possibilities is particularly good.
It's called a horizon and Phoenix is "EAST" of Hawaii.
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
I've seen two, very slightly different, angles of the object and the orange light is only present in one of them. Seems to me that a rocket exhaust should be quite visible regardless of the angle, and that it's appearance/disappearance would make a reflection seem more likely. As for the contrail forming right on the object, if it is an airplane most of it's velocity is directly away from the camera. There could be a mile between the contrail and the plane and from that angle it would look like they were right next to each other.
Depends on what you mean by air defense. If you mean an automated system that can shoot down ballistic missiles then no. There has been work on that off and on, that's what the whole "Star Wars" project is/was. However nothing operational at this point, or at least nothing that is admitted to (and that is the kind of system where publicly admitting it is useful).
In terms of defense against air attacks? Yes, tons. The US has a bunch of air bases all around its borders. The Air Force and Air National Guard operated bases in most states with fighters (F-16s and F-22s mostly) to deal with threats. In terms of tracking incoming craft, that is done on a continuous basis by massive radar installations. The PAVE PAWS radar arrays provide complete coverage of the US borders out to very long distances (like 3000km). All inbound craft are tracked and known.
So what's the deal here? Well the deal is nothing happened, that's what. There was nothing out of the ordinary so nobody noticed anything. All commercial flights are well known. They file flight plans, keep ground controllers appraised of their progress, and show up on civilian radar. See the radar you get at airports actually isn't normal radar. It doesn't track any object in the sky, it is Secondary Surveillance Radar. Rather what it is doing is looking for transponders. All commercial and private planes have to have one that say who they are. So what happens, more or less, is the radar says "Hi who are you?" and the plane responds "This is my callsign." Works great and makes tracking much easier, you don't have to have someone analyze the radar signals to tell if they are real returns or not (radar can get returns off of birds, air currents, etc if the power is high enough) and you can keep easy track of what everything is.
A plane that has an active transponder and a known flight plan is nothing out of the ordinary. There are thousands a day. So nobody takes any notice, that is shit working how it should. So when the military was asked "Did you do this?" they truthfully answered "No we didn't." When the FAA was asked "Did you see anything weird?" they again truthfully said "No we didn't." Because neither had seen anything weird, no evidence of any problems, they didn't go digging. The military isn't going to go all crazy because there is a picture of a contrail. The PAVE PAWS in Beale didn't see anything problematic, who gives a shit?
I am guessing IUSS was also clear of any unknown subs and so on.
Nobody noticed anything because there was nothing to notice, except visually, and neither the DOD or FAA check that because it isn't useful. Everything in terms of monitoring was fine. They may have opened an inquiry in to what happened so they could give people an answer, but that can take time since it isn't high priority and you want to give a correct answer. Or they may have just not given a shit since it was clearly just someone who'd snapped a picture of a jet and didn't know what it was. They knew it was NOT a missile as that would have been tracked.
Do the media and government lie? Of course they do, I'm no fool. However that does not mean that they lie about EVERYTHING, and it does not mean this wasn't just an airplane. The camera operator tracked the object for ten entire minutes. If it's a missile, it's the slowest moving missile, ever.
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.