PETA, which I think stands for Practitioners of the Esteemed Tradition of Animism, has launched a campaign against the killing (none dare call it murder) of what they call "sea kittens," commonly known to all users of the English language as "fish." The idea is that people won't kill--or at least won't eat--anything called "kittens." Never mind that PETA kills over 90% of the animals it "rescues," including kittens; they recommend that their constituents send the following letter to the head of the Fish and Wildlife Service of the USA.
The Fish and Wildlife Service's promotion of fishing is a glaring contradiction of its mission. Neurobiologists tell us that fish have nervous systems that comprehend and respond to pain, and that, when it comes to the ability to feel pain, fish are just like dogs, cats, and all other animals. Dr. Donald Broom, a scientific advisor to the British government, explains, "The scientific literature is quite clear. Anatomically, physiologically and biologically, the pain system in fish is virtually the same as in birds and mammals." Scientists have created a detailed map of pain receptors in fish's mouths and all over their bodies.
In light of these facts, I urge you to do the right thing by adhering to the FWS' stated mission to protect fish. Stop your department's promotion of fishing! I urge you to instead advocate nonviolent pastimes, such as bird-watching, canoeing, or hiking.
A sidebar on the PETA website informs us that the proper term for caviar is "Baby Sea Kittens."
Somebody needs to tell the folks at PETA that the Supreme Court does not take an interest in protecting fish from their killers until at least the 24th week of gestation. Prior to that, Sea Kitten Fetuses are fair game. And no one gives a rip if they feel pain at any time prior to actual hatching.
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Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Vice Kills
The above title came to mind as I perused a copy of The New York Spectator printed in June 1836. Along with reports of shipwrecks and Texan victory in their war of independence from Mexico, the following three items caught my attention:
DUEL IN HIGH LIFE.--Our London correspondent states that a duel had taken place between Lord Melbourne and the husband of the Hon. Mrs. Norton, author of "The Undying One." The premier received a pistol wound, though not of a dangerous character. The probable cause of the duel is no secret, either here or in London. Rumors of a rather too great intimacy between lord[sic] Melbourne and Mrs. Norton, who is one of the most beautiful women in England, have been rife for the last two or three years. Mr. Norton, however, has always been represented, hitherto, as conveniently blind to the existing state of affairs; and it has been said, even, that his appointment as police magistrate was obtained through the influence of Lord Melbourne, as the reward for his discreet lack of observation.
Cause of the injury: Gun ownership? Hardly. Adultery to begin with, along with an insane law that allows a man to kill another over a perceived slight. The latter has been successfully extinguished from our national culture; the former is as rampant as ever, now close to enjoying the cultural acceptance previously held only by the latter.
FATAL RECONTRE.--An unfortunate affair took place at the race ground near this place on Wednesday last, the first day of the races. Mr. Beverly Pryor, a young man from Huntsville, Alabama, suspecting there had been foul play in the race, attacked and knocked down one of the trainers. Mr. Eli Abbott, of this town, remonstrated with him on such conduct, and told him that the race ground was not a proper place for such disturbances. Upon this Pryor drew a pistol, pushed the muzzle into the face of Abbott so violently as to take off the skin, telling him at the same time to draw and defend himself. Abbott declared that he had no pistol. Just at this time, Pryor's friend snapped a pistol at Abbott, which momentarily drew off the attention of Pryor. Abbott taking advantage of this occasion, instantly drew a large knife, plunged it into the breast of Pryor, turned and severely wounded the friend in the arm, who made off, and Abbott followed him. Pryor, though mortally wounded, pursued Abbott some fifteen or twenty paces, snapped his pistol repeatedly at him and then fell, and expired without a groan.
Comment upon this melancholy recontre is not we presume called for from us. One remark, however, we cannot refrain from making. The practice which is becoming so common, of carrying pistols and knives, cannot be too much condemned. If public sentiment does not restrain it, the strong arm of the law ought to be brought in to put it down.
The affair produced considerable sensation in town. The unanimous impression seems to be that Abbott was perfectly justifiable. He immediately delivered himself up to the officers of the law, by whom he was discharges, upon the ground, that it was a case of justifiable homicide. --Mississippi Free Press
We see here that it was not the habit of carrying such weapons that produced such a danger, but the readiness with which they were used to settle a quarrel. It was only a technicality upon which Mr. Abbott's innocence was based; he had not yet agreed to the duel at the time he was attacked. But we also see here that the real root of the problem was the greed behind the anger at a losing bet--and once again we see that vice was at the root of the crime.
SUICIDE OF THE HON. BERKELY CRAVEN.--A considerable sensation has been produced in the fashionable sporting world by the suicide of the Hon. Berkely Craven, so well known on the turf, who put a period to his existence by shooting himself through the head with a pistol, at his residence. The particulars of the melancholy affair, are as follow :--The deceased, it appeared, was a loser by the Derby Stakes to an enormous extent, some say as much as £30,000.
As soon as the result of the race became known, he was observed by his friends to be excessively agitated, and in this state he left Epson, and arrived at his residence. He flung himself on the sofa in the parlour[sic] in a state of mental distraction, and all attempts to solace him being in vain, the domestics were forced reluctantly to leave him, and he retire to bed at a late hour.
About six o'clock on the following morning, one of the female servants came down stars, and on entering the parlor a most appalling spectacle was presented to her view ; the body of her master was found extended on the floor, deluged in blood, which had flowed from a frightful wound in the head, and near him lay a large duelling pistol, with which it was evident that the deed had been perpetrated.
What more can we say? The greed expressed through the vice of racing having been allowed to destroy the inner man, it remained only for the duelling pistol, that weapon of legalized murder, to do its work on the owner rather than on his opponent. In all three of these sad stories we see that vice kills; it needs only the tool and the opportunity, and death will follow sin as sure as night follows day.
Monday, 15 June 2009
Don't like slavery? Then don't own one: A lesson from history
As a historian, The White Man is always on the lookout for those who are repeating history rather than learning it. One such situation seems to be emerging in regards to the threatened abolition of abortion.
More than a decade ago, Rush Limbaugh coined the word 'feminazi' to describe women who were determined to push their radical views on the majority. This category of person has not gone away, and it is interesting to see the parallels between the antiabolitionists of the 21st century and the antiabolitionists of the 19th century.
The antiabolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries were, of course, opposed to the abolition of slavery, which had begun in the late 18th century in New England and soon spread to the remainder of states north of the Mason-Dixon line. Parity thus achieved was then maintained by Congress admitting new states to the Union in a careful balance of slave and free. But by 1846, the former territories of the South had all become slave states, and the balance could no longer be maintained with the consecutive admission of Iowa and Wisconsin into the Union as free states.
As the antiabolitionists saw their relative presentation in Washington diminishing, they became more and more adamant about imposing slavery on the new territories whether they wanted it or not. It was this belligerence more than anything else that precipitated the Civil War.
The antiabolitionists of the 20th and 21st centuries are opposed to the abolition of abortion. With poll results showing a continued drop in the support for decriminalized abortion among the American populace, they are becoming more and more belligerent. Unable to force abortion on any more Americans, they are intent on exporting it throughout the world, as evidenced by President Obama's repeal of the Mexico City Policy, and the recent passage in the House of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act.
It is hoped that these antiabolitionists will learn a lesson from history. Abolitionists were successful only on their home turf, as long as antiabolitionists were content to keep slavery on theirs. Only once the antiabolitionists began forcibly exporting slavery to states that voted against it, like Kansas, did blood began to flow. And by the time it stopped flowing, the South was in ruins and slavery was universally abolished.
Antiabolitionists like the taunting slogan, "Don't like abortion? Then don't have one!" But by forcing the US State Department to blacklist nations that refuse to remove anti-abortion laws from their books, they run the risk of awakening a sleeping giant, and eventually finding that the resulting backlash will re-criminalize abortion in their own nation.
And as before, Bleeding Kansas appears to be the tipping point.
More than a decade ago, Rush Limbaugh coined the word 'feminazi' to describe women who were determined to push their radical views on the majority. This category of person has not gone away, and it is interesting to see the parallels between the antiabolitionists of the 21st century and the antiabolitionists of the 19th century.
The antiabolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries were, of course, opposed to the abolition of slavery, which had begun in the late 18th century in New England and soon spread to the remainder of states north of the Mason-Dixon line. Parity thus achieved was then maintained by Congress admitting new states to the Union in a careful balance of slave and free. But by 1846, the former territories of the South had all become slave states, and the balance could no longer be maintained with the consecutive admission of Iowa and Wisconsin into the Union as free states.
As the antiabolitionists saw their relative presentation in Washington diminishing, they became more and more adamant about imposing slavery on the new territories whether they wanted it or not. It was this belligerence more than anything else that precipitated the Civil War.
The antiabolitionists of the 20th and 21st centuries are opposed to the abolition of abortion. With poll results showing a continued drop in the support for decriminalized abortion among the American populace, they are becoming more and more belligerent. Unable to force abortion on any more Americans, they are intent on exporting it throughout the world, as evidenced by President Obama's repeal of the Mexico City Policy, and the recent passage in the House of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act.
It is hoped that these antiabolitionists will learn a lesson from history. Abolitionists were successful only on their home turf, as long as antiabolitionists were content to keep slavery on theirs. Only once the antiabolitionists began forcibly exporting slavery to states that voted against it, like Kansas, did blood began to flow. And by the time it stopped flowing, the South was in ruins and slavery was universally abolished.
Antiabolitionists like the taunting slogan, "Don't like abortion? Then don't have one!" But by forcing the US State Department to blacklist nations that refuse to remove anti-abortion laws from their books, they run the risk of awakening a sleeping giant, and eventually finding that the resulting backlash will re-criminalize abortion in their own nation.
And as before, Bleeding Kansas appears to be the tipping point.
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Tiller the Killer: Let's set the record straight
The White Man mourns the untimely death of George Tiller, who recently became the victim of an illegal late-term abortion; very late-term, it occurred some 822 months after he began to grow inside his mother's womb. The abortionist has been identified as Scott Roeder, who was neither officially trained nor licensed to perform the procedure that resulted in Tiller's death. Neither was the facility where the abortion was performed--Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita--approved for this procedure. As a result, Roeder has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder, a non-capital offense in Bleeding Kansas.
The purpose of this post is not to offer an opinion as to whether this abortion was right or wrong, or whether laws against this type of abortion should be passed or upheld. It is just to address some of the incorrect or inconsistent statements flying around in regards to George Tiller and his fatal encounter with Scott Roeder.
First of all, it is commonly alleged that most of the people George Tiller killed were deformed babies. On the other hand, we have George Tiller himself stating in 1995, more than 13 years before he himself was aborted:
"We have some experience with late terminations: about 10,000 patients between 24 and 36 weeks and something like 800 fetal anomalies between 26 and 36 weeks in the past 5 years."
So, there you have it. Although he went on to abort another 50,000 patients, the ratio at that time was less than one per cent deformed babies and over 99 per cent healthy babies. This says nothing of the deformed and healthy women who died as collateral damage when he was going after their offspring.
It has been mentioned several times that an earlier illegal abortion was attempted on George Tiller, by Rachelle Ranae Shannon, in 1993. This botched abortion resulted in superficial wounds to the patient's arms, but no lasting damage, and Tiller survived to kill again. What's often claimed regarding "Shelly" Shannon is that she received a life sentence for attempted murder. This isn't true; she received 11 years. After being arrested for the illegal abortion attempt, however, she confessed to a number of federal offenses and is now doing time for arson, interference with commerce by force and interstate travel in aid of racketeering--which, in her case, carried almost double the penalty for attempted murder. She continues to unsuccessfully appeal these convictions, and is scheduled to be released in another 9 years.
It's also claimed that she is imprisoned in California; this was true at one point, but as of press time she's housed in a low-security federal prison for white females in Minnesota.
The claim is also being noised abroad that what George Tiller did included the rare late-term abortion. In fact, it was his specialty, and women came from around the country to participate. It has been a lot more rare for the past week, that much is obvious; but as long as Women's Health Care Services remained open, it was one of the most common surgical procedures in Wichita.
Finally, we could go into the hundreds of thousands of dollars George Tiller spent keeping the law off his case, but nothing misleading seems to have been reported on this topic. Suffice it to say that his demise probably means a significant drop in funding for the Wichita political machine.
The purpose of this post is not to offer an opinion as to whether this abortion was right or wrong, or whether laws against this type of abortion should be passed or upheld. It is just to address some of the incorrect or inconsistent statements flying around in regards to George Tiller and his fatal encounter with Scott Roeder.
First of all, it is commonly alleged that most of the people George Tiller killed were deformed babies. On the other hand, we have George Tiller himself stating in 1995, more than 13 years before he himself was aborted:
"We have some experience with late terminations: about 10,000 patients between 24 and 36 weeks and something like 800 fetal anomalies between 26 and 36 weeks in the past 5 years."
So, there you have it. Although he went on to abort another 50,000 patients, the ratio at that time was less than one per cent deformed babies and over 99 per cent healthy babies. This says nothing of the deformed and healthy women who died as collateral damage when he was going after their offspring.
It has been mentioned several times that an earlier illegal abortion was attempted on George Tiller, by Rachelle Ranae Shannon, in 1993. This botched abortion resulted in superficial wounds to the patient's arms, but no lasting damage, and Tiller survived to kill again. What's often claimed regarding "Shelly" Shannon is that she received a life sentence for attempted murder. This isn't true; she received 11 years. After being arrested for the illegal abortion attempt, however, she confessed to a number of federal offenses and is now doing time for arson, interference with commerce by force and interstate travel in aid of racketeering--which, in her case, carried almost double the penalty for attempted murder. She continues to unsuccessfully appeal these convictions, and is scheduled to be released in another 9 years.
It's also claimed that she is imprisoned in California; this was true at one point, but as of press time she's housed in a low-security federal prison for white females in Minnesota.
The claim is also being noised abroad that what George Tiller did included the rare late-term abortion. In fact, it was his specialty, and women came from around the country to participate. It has been a lot more rare for the past week, that much is obvious; but as long as Women's Health Care Services remained open, it was one of the most common surgical procedures in Wichita.
Finally, we could go into the hundreds of thousands of dollars George Tiller spent keeping the law off his case, but nothing misleading seems to have been reported on this topic. Suffice it to say that his demise probably means a significant drop in funding for the Wichita political machine.
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Flight 447: Answering the Questions
As anyone who was following the news on June 1, 2009 knows, Air France Flight 447 turned up missing in the mid-Atlantic en route from Rio to Paris. I'm opening up this post now, on June 3, as reports come in that the crash site has been located and recovery units are headed to the scene. I'll continue to visit this situation and add more information as the situation develops. I intend to address the following questions:
1) Is this the greatest air disaster in history?
2) Could there be any survivors?
3) Could it have been a terrorist attack?
4) Could it have been caused by bad weather?
5) Will the cockpit data recorders give any clues as to the cause of the crash?
First, I'd like to comment on the phrase now being used, "Lost over the Atlantic."
Despite the settled claim the wording has in the English language, Flight 447 was never "lost over the Atlantic." This well-turned phrase hearkens back to the early days of Lindbergh and Balchen, when planes took off from one coast, not to be heard from until they reached the other. If they didn't show up, they were "lost over the Atlantic," which could mean that they got off course and landed somewhere else, ran out of fuel and had to ditch, or perhaps had actually flown into the ocean in bad weather.
None of these things happen now. Both pilots and air controllers know within a few miles where a commercial airplane is at any moment. Yes, pilots sometimes divert from their course to get around a thunderstorm, but they always let the controllers know what they are doing. A quarter of an hour before Flight 447 broke up in midair, the pilot sent a signal back to Brazil that he was flying into a thundercloud. It was clear after the burst of automatic signals had reached Paris that Flight 447 was lost--not over, but in, the Atlantic. And it is in the Atlantic that searchers have been looking for the wreckage; first on the surface, and eventually at the bottom.
Now on to Question Number One.
Although this is the worst air disaster in Air France's history, there have been several airplane crashes with far greater loss of life, beginning with the Tenerife disaster, when KLM Flight 4805 flew into Pan Am Flight 1736 on takeoff, killing all 248 aboard the KLM 747 and 335 on the Pan Am plane. The deaths can be indirectly blamed on a terrorist attack; both planes had landed at the inadequate Tenerife runway after a small explosion in the terminal of the Las Palmas airport rendered it temporarily off-limits to incoming flights. Most of the other nine reasons for the crash were due to technology limitations and the human factor, along with a fear of violating Dutch overtime laws.
The second worse airplane crash ever took 520 lives aboard Japan Air Lines Flight 123 on August 12, 1985. This was, at the time, the deadliest crash ever, and the number of fatalities in a single airplane has never been exceeded, and probably never will be; few planes ever take off that heavily loaded. The 747 on a domestic run had just reached cruising altitude after takeoff from Tokyo when the rupture of a faultily repaired aft bulkhead, damaged in a hard landing seven years earlier, drained the hydraulic system, rendering the jet almost uncontrollable. After a 32-minute struggle to gain control of the plane, the flight crew brought it down so low that it hit one of the foothills of Mt. Fuji. The maintenance supervisor responsible for signing off on the plane's airworthiness later committed suicide--the 521st fatality from the crash.
What's amazing is that even though the airplane clipped the side of a mountain, flipped over, and landed on its back at hundreds of miles an hour, not everyone died. It's unknown for sure how many survived the impact--one survivor landed in a tree--but by the time rescuers finally got around to making their way to the crash site, they only found four survivors, and evidence that many more had died of their injuries overnight while awaiting rescue.
The single worst terrorist-caused air disaster was on June 23, 1985, when a suitcase bomb blew up Air India Flight 182 between Montreal and London. The 747 fell out of the sky into 2,000 meters of water 120 miles off the Irish coast, killing all 329 aboard--more than died aboard all three hijacked airplanes on 9/11. Subsequent medical examination of the bodies showed that some had died of drowning, indicating that they were still breathing when their bodies hit the water after a drop of 31,000 feet.
So the first question is not hard to answer--this isn't the worst air disaster in history; it doesn't even make the top ten. It's not the most people to die when an airplane broke up on or over the ocean; it's not even the most for a 2-engine airplane, although all but one of the top 10 (an Airbus 300 shot down over the Persian Gulf in 1988) involved 3- or 4-engine aircraft.
This will amaze most of my readers, but they probably haven't even heard about any of the last ten major air disasters, in each of which an average of 163 people died--more than three times the combined air and ground casualties of Continental Connection Flight 3407. Count on it, unless at least one American citizen is killed in an air crash--any air crash--it generally doesn't even rate Page Two coverage.
Moving on to Question Number Two, we can learn some lessons from the worst air disasters: first of all, that an airplane certified as airworthy can carry a hidden factor just waiting to blow it out of the sky--whether that factor be a bomb or a bungled repair job. Secondly, that it's possible to survive being blown out of the sky, but continued survival is contingent upon quick rescue. This is why forces from three countries converged on the area so quickly on June first. But by the time any of them reached the scene, it would have already been too late. Anyone still alive after the plane broke apart was most likely dead by the time the sun rose on Flight 447's fuel slick.
Here's what the people on the plane had to survive, just to reach the storm-tossed surface of the mid-Atlantic [but see second update]:
1) Rapid decompression at 35,000 feet would have popped numerous blood vessels in their eyes and noses. Their hands would have swollen so fast, it's unlikely anyone could have released a seatbelt until they reached lower altitudes. And the captain would certainly have required everyone to be buckled before he took the plane into a thundercloud.
2) Temperatures about 40 degrees below zero would have caused almost instant frostbite.
3) The shock of deceleration from 520 miles an hour would have broken limbs like matchsticks.
4) Pieces of wreckage would have filled the air, with potential extreme trauma injuries.
Even if they survived the shock of hitting the water, they would have penetrated so deeply before resurfacing that their traumatized lungs would probably have filled with water.
There is one very real possibility, though, that the tremendous updrafts associated with the thundercloud that brought down Flight 447 may have contributed to the temporary survival of some passengers. In 1971, several passengers survived the crash of LANSA Airlines Flight 508 when it blew apart in a thunderstorm over the Peruvian jungle. They were still buckled in their seats when they hit the ground, and it is thought that their fall was greatly slowed by updrafts. We'll come back to Flight 508 later.
So if any passengers of Flight 447 did survive the breakup, they would have to have remained buckled in an intact portion of the aircraft, thus being sheltered from the wind and cold as their piece of the airplane descended; assumed a braced position before hitting the water; and managed to swim to the surface before their seat sank to the bottom. It's almost inconceivable, though, that they didn't have enough injuries by then to attract sharks to their bleeding bodies before daybreak brought with it some hope of rescue.
Moving on to the question of a terrorist attack: I can guarantee that France's investigation will conclude that anything else caused Flight 447 to fall out of the sky before they admit that a terrorist bomb did it. And I won't say why. Just oogle the following search terms and you may come to the same conclusion:
Flight 800 shot
Flight 587 flat
But regardless of what the official report ends up saying, I don't believe that a terrorist bomb brought down Flight 447. For one thing, there's a reason why this is Air France's worst air disaster ever: terrorists don't target French airlines. Even Richard Reid, flying out of Paris, chose an American Airlines flight on which to detonate his shoe bomb. Terrorists target airlines like American, TWA, and Pan Am (the last two of which having gone out of business in the wake of their air disasters). A flight from Rio to Paris just wouldn't be on anyone's target list.
Secondly, the timing was too coincidental. A bomb does not just happen to go off--or a meteor strike--just after a plane enters an area of tremendous turbulence and electrical activity. Wings do fall off, and fly-by-wire systems do fail, however, in exactly such circumstances.
I'll answer Question Number Five now, as Question Number Four will take a while.
No doubt the cockpit data recorders will give some clues as to the cause of the crash, but we already have most of the information needed to find out what caused the crash, and it's unlikely that the data recorders will tell us much we don't already know. Voice recordings have shown to be notoriously deficient in explaining what went on in the final seconds of a flight that ended in disaster; you won't generally hear things like, "Oh, there goes the right wing" or "why isn't this @#% thing working?" Pilots in an air disaster are concentrating on keeping the plane under control, not on describing what's going wrong.
The Data Recorder won't tell us how fast the updraft was; how much the wind shear was; whether it was a negative or positive lightning strike; how many gallons per minute of water the engines were taking in; or even how fast the plane was flying, inasmuch as the information we already have gives two conflicting readings.
And this leads us right into the Fourth Question.
You see, part of the contributing factors to this crash, as well as many or most others, was a strange combination of old and new technology. Airplane designers have to decide whether they want the pilot or the computer to fly the plane, because a disagreement between the two often ends in disaster. The aircraft used in Flight 447 was an Airbus A330, which employs a state-of-the-art computer system that is capable of taking over from the pilot when it perceives he isn't flying the plane correctly. Only when all else fails does it turn control back over to the pilot. Yet the instrument feeding airspeed information into the computer was a Pitot tube, an invention that pre-dates the airplane itself and has remained relatively unchanged for over 150 years. The only modification of note is that after it was found to ice up at only a few thousand feet of elevation, an electric heater was added to keep its intake clear of ice. This small heater seems to have proven inadequate to handle the extreme icing conditions possible in a mid-Atlantic tropical thundercloud. Despite this, pilots are given no training on how to recognize, much less respond to, this deadly condition.
As well as the Global Positioning System technology has proved at identifying the location of an aircraft in mid ocean, it has not been approved for use in identifying the rate of change in location, commonly referred to as speed. And had the A330's radar screen been allowed to instead display an online satellite image, it's highly unlikely that the flight crew would have flown into the 100 mph updrafts that were only visible on the latter. Once again, state-of-the-art flight systems are shown to have limitations that are as much legislative as technological in nature.
June 8, 2009
I'm closing out this post today. Many bodies have been recovered, at tremendous expense. Per capita, I don't doubt the three governments will have spent more than the US did on weregild for 9/11 by the time this is all over. Obviously changes in procedures for transoceanic flights will result in the aftermath; see the link in the post title for some suggestions.
The fact that the bodies were found 45 miles farther down the track suggests that the computers on board the Airbus had pushed the craft to an unsustainable speed following faulty input from the frozen pitot tubes. For sure this will be changed, as this has happened before and will happen again if modern technology is not brought to bear on a 200 year old invention.
Having addressed these questions to the best of my ability, I will now leave the discussion to others.
And now I can start posting about something else again.
FIRST UPDATE April 2012
Well, it's been 10 months since the cockpit and data recorders were found, but the official report still hasn't been issued. Suffice it to say that there won't be a whole lot to add once it is. Flight 447 really was flown into the ocean, for the simple reason that the pilot kept the plane nose-up, at too high of an angle to sustain altitude, from 38,000 feet all the way down to sea level. He did this because the planes' computer was programmed in such a way that every time he lowered the nose, a warning sounded alerting him that the nose was too high. But when he raised the nose again, the alarm went silent. The flight crew, all during their 3 minutes of rapid descent, were being bombarded with frequent and often conflicting computer-generated warnings. The most effective way of dealing with them all appeared to be exactly what was done: flying the aircraft into the sea.
It has been said that all safety regulations are written in blood--the blood of those whose deaths showed the need for them. Inasmuch as aircraft engineers will now take a more human-centered approach to how a plane is flown in crisis situations, they both ensure that the passengers of Flight 477 did not die in vain, and show once more that in a crisis with massive equipment failure, no control system designed by the human brain has ever managed to improve on the human brain itself.
SECOND UPDATE June 2013
Looking back over this post, I see that I had given a scenario in which the plane fell apart at altitude. This clearly did not happen; passengers would have ridden in relative comfort all the way to the water's surface. However, the scenario in the cockpit is chilling in its resemblance to what happened in the final minute of Flight 3407's approach to Buffalo: amidst much confusion, as a stall warning horn broke the pilot out of his autopilot-induced lassitude, he gave the opposite control input needed to keep the plane in the air. Tragically, at the time Flight 447 went down, the "Lessons Learned" from Flight 3407 were yet to be published. The changes in aviation policy that have resulted from these closely related disasters could mean that from now on, pilots will finally be able to resist the urge to pull up on the stick when in a free fall at low airspeed due to icing.
THIRD UPDATE August 2013
I see that I was going to say more on the crash of Flight 508. I can't remember now what it was, although I have since learned that it set the task of Bible Translation in the Western Amazon Basin back by several months or years. Finally, it appears that the only thing that saved any of the passengers and crew on Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was a willingness of the pilot to take over from the computer before it flew the airplane into the ground. Unfortunately for those who were hurt in the crash, he was too late in taking over to completely prevent the plane from hitting a sea wall at the end of the runway.
FOURTH UPDATE March 2013
For those searching on information regarding Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, follow the links from this update.
FIFTH UPDATE December 2014
Whenever there is an air disaster, this page draws a lot of viewers. So I suppose I should briefly say something about Asia Air Flight 8501.
As with all breaking news stories, we are being fed a lot of disinformation. There were 40 bodies found. No, seven. No, six. Well, two were brought back to land. One was wearing a life jacket. No, it wasn't. And so on. About all I can say with confidence at this point, two days after the crash is:
1. It was weather-related. The plane, like Flight 447, was flying into a thunderstorm.
2. I'm sure that the altimeter problem on this Airbus had been fixed, but there was still the computer vs. pilot problem, and this being a cut-rate airline, I'm afraid the pilot wasn't up to the challenge.
3. There were no survivors.
Among the interesting bits of trivia, this flight having originated in an officially Muslim country:
1. Most of the passengers were Christian Indonesians.
2. Among the passengers was a family of Korean missionaries to Indonesia.
3. Despite there being no Americans on board, this disaster made front-page news in America.
SIXTH UPDATE May 21, 2016
With the demise of Egyptair Flight 804, we are getting used to the scenario of conflicting reports emerging from a search-and-rescue mission. What I should point out in relation to this is that search teams ALWAYS find debris in the area of a downed aircraft, for the simple reason that the ocean is full of it. Initial reports of crash-related debris are therefore almost always followed up by a retraction.
SEVENTH UPDATE: an historical account of the crash
1) Is this the greatest air disaster in history?
2) Could there be any survivors?
3) Could it have been a terrorist attack?
4) Could it have been caused by bad weather?
5) Will the cockpit data recorders give any clues as to the cause of the crash?
First, I'd like to comment on the phrase now being used, "Lost over the Atlantic."
Despite the settled claim the wording has in the English language, Flight 447 was never "lost over the Atlantic." This well-turned phrase hearkens back to the early days of Lindbergh and Balchen, when planes took off from one coast, not to be heard from until they reached the other. If they didn't show up, they were "lost over the Atlantic," which could mean that they got off course and landed somewhere else, ran out of fuel and had to ditch, or perhaps had actually flown into the ocean in bad weather.
None of these things happen now. Both pilots and air controllers know within a few miles where a commercial airplane is at any moment. Yes, pilots sometimes divert from their course to get around a thunderstorm, but they always let the controllers know what they are doing. A quarter of an hour before Flight 447 broke up in midair, the pilot sent a signal back to Brazil that he was flying into a thundercloud. It was clear after the burst of automatic signals had reached Paris that Flight 447 was lost--not over, but in, the Atlantic. And it is in the Atlantic that searchers have been looking for the wreckage; first on the surface, and eventually at the bottom.
Now on to Question Number One.
Although this is the worst air disaster in Air France's history, there have been several airplane crashes with far greater loss of life, beginning with the Tenerife disaster, when KLM Flight 4805 flew into Pan Am Flight 1736 on takeoff, killing all 248 aboard the KLM 747 and 335 on the Pan Am plane. The deaths can be indirectly blamed on a terrorist attack; both planes had landed at the inadequate Tenerife runway after a small explosion in the terminal of the Las Palmas airport rendered it temporarily off-limits to incoming flights. Most of the other nine reasons for the crash were due to technology limitations and the human factor, along with a fear of violating Dutch overtime laws.
The second worse airplane crash ever took 520 lives aboard Japan Air Lines Flight 123 on August 12, 1985. This was, at the time, the deadliest crash ever, and the number of fatalities in a single airplane has never been exceeded, and probably never will be; few planes ever take off that heavily loaded. The 747 on a domestic run had just reached cruising altitude after takeoff from Tokyo when the rupture of a faultily repaired aft bulkhead, damaged in a hard landing seven years earlier, drained the hydraulic system, rendering the jet almost uncontrollable. After a 32-minute struggle to gain control of the plane, the flight crew brought it down so low that it hit one of the foothills of Mt. Fuji. The maintenance supervisor responsible for signing off on the plane's airworthiness later committed suicide--the 521st fatality from the crash.
What's amazing is that even though the airplane clipped the side of a mountain, flipped over, and landed on its back at hundreds of miles an hour, not everyone died. It's unknown for sure how many survived the impact--one survivor landed in a tree--but by the time rescuers finally got around to making their way to the crash site, they only found four survivors, and evidence that many more had died of their injuries overnight while awaiting rescue.
The single worst terrorist-caused air disaster was on June 23, 1985, when a suitcase bomb blew up Air India Flight 182 between Montreal and London. The 747 fell out of the sky into 2,000 meters of water 120 miles off the Irish coast, killing all 329 aboard--more than died aboard all three hijacked airplanes on 9/11. Subsequent medical examination of the bodies showed that some had died of drowning, indicating that they were still breathing when their bodies hit the water after a drop of 31,000 feet.
So the first question is not hard to answer--this isn't the worst air disaster in history; it doesn't even make the top ten. It's not the most people to die when an airplane broke up on or over the ocean; it's not even the most for a 2-engine airplane, although all but one of the top 10 (an Airbus 300 shot down over the Persian Gulf in 1988) involved 3- or 4-engine aircraft.
This will amaze most of my readers, but they probably haven't even heard about any of the last ten major air disasters, in each of which an average of 163 people died--more than three times the combined air and ground casualties of Continental Connection Flight 3407. Count on it, unless at least one American citizen is killed in an air crash--any air crash--it generally doesn't even rate Page Two coverage.
Moving on to Question Number Two, we can learn some lessons from the worst air disasters: first of all, that an airplane certified as airworthy can carry a hidden factor just waiting to blow it out of the sky--whether that factor be a bomb or a bungled repair job. Secondly, that it's possible to survive being blown out of the sky, but continued survival is contingent upon quick rescue. This is why forces from three countries converged on the area so quickly on June first. But by the time any of them reached the scene, it would have already been too late. Anyone still alive after the plane broke apart was most likely dead by the time the sun rose on Flight 447's fuel slick.
Here's what the people on the plane had to survive, just to reach the storm-tossed surface of the mid-Atlantic [but see second update]:
1) Rapid decompression at 35,000 feet would have popped numerous blood vessels in their eyes and noses. Their hands would have swollen so fast, it's unlikely anyone could have released a seatbelt until they reached lower altitudes. And the captain would certainly have required everyone to be buckled before he took the plane into a thundercloud.
2) Temperatures about 40 degrees below zero would have caused almost instant frostbite.
3) The shock of deceleration from 520 miles an hour would have broken limbs like matchsticks.
4) Pieces of wreckage would have filled the air, with potential extreme trauma injuries.
Even if they survived the shock of hitting the water, they would have penetrated so deeply before resurfacing that their traumatized lungs would probably have filled with water.
There is one very real possibility, though, that the tremendous updrafts associated with the thundercloud that brought down Flight 447 may have contributed to the temporary survival of some passengers. In 1971, several passengers survived the crash of LANSA Airlines Flight 508 when it blew apart in a thunderstorm over the Peruvian jungle. They were still buckled in their seats when they hit the ground, and it is thought that their fall was greatly slowed by updrafts. We'll come back to Flight 508 later.
So if any passengers of Flight 447 did survive the breakup, they would have to have remained buckled in an intact portion of the aircraft, thus being sheltered from the wind and cold as their piece of the airplane descended; assumed a braced position before hitting the water; and managed to swim to the surface before their seat sank to the bottom. It's almost inconceivable, though, that they didn't have enough injuries by then to attract sharks to their bleeding bodies before daybreak brought with it some hope of rescue.
Moving on to the question of a terrorist attack: I can guarantee that France's investigation will conclude that anything else caused Flight 447 to fall out of the sky before they admit that a terrorist bomb did it. And I won't say why. Just oogle the following search terms and you may come to the same conclusion:
Flight 800 shot
Flight 587 flat
But regardless of what the official report ends up saying, I don't believe that a terrorist bomb brought down Flight 447. For one thing, there's a reason why this is Air France's worst air disaster ever: terrorists don't target French airlines. Even Richard Reid, flying out of Paris, chose an American Airlines flight on which to detonate his shoe bomb. Terrorists target airlines like American, TWA, and Pan Am (the last two of which having gone out of business in the wake of their air disasters). A flight from Rio to Paris just wouldn't be on anyone's target list.
Secondly, the timing was too coincidental. A bomb does not just happen to go off--or a meteor strike--just after a plane enters an area of tremendous turbulence and electrical activity. Wings do fall off, and fly-by-wire systems do fail, however, in exactly such circumstances.
I'll answer Question Number Five now, as Question Number Four will take a while.
No doubt the cockpit data recorders will give some clues as to the cause of the crash, but we already have most of the information needed to find out what caused the crash, and it's unlikely that the data recorders will tell us much we don't already know. Voice recordings have shown to be notoriously deficient in explaining what went on in the final seconds of a flight that ended in disaster; you won't generally hear things like, "Oh, there goes the right wing" or "why isn't this @#% thing working?" Pilots in an air disaster are concentrating on keeping the plane under control, not on describing what's going wrong.
The Data Recorder won't tell us how fast the updraft was; how much the wind shear was; whether it was a negative or positive lightning strike; how many gallons per minute of water the engines were taking in; or even how fast the plane was flying, inasmuch as the information we already have gives two conflicting readings.
And this leads us right into the Fourth Question.
You see, part of the contributing factors to this crash, as well as many or most others, was a strange combination of old and new technology. Airplane designers have to decide whether they want the pilot or the computer to fly the plane, because a disagreement between the two often ends in disaster. The aircraft used in Flight 447 was an Airbus A330, which employs a state-of-the-art computer system that is capable of taking over from the pilot when it perceives he isn't flying the plane correctly. Only when all else fails does it turn control back over to the pilot. Yet the instrument feeding airspeed information into the computer was a Pitot tube, an invention that pre-dates the airplane itself and has remained relatively unchanged for over 150 years. The only modification of note is that after it was found to ice up at only a few thousand feet of elevation, an electric heater was added to keep its intake clear of ice. This small heater seems to have proven inadequate to handle the extreme icing conditions possible in a mid-Atlantic tropical thundercloud. Despite this, pilots are given no training on how to recognize, much less respond to, this deadly condition.
As well as the Global Positioning System technology has proved at identifying the location of an aircraft in mid ocean, it has not been approved for use in identifying the rate of change in location, commonly referred to as speed. And had the A330's radar screen been allowed to instead display an online satellite image, it's highly unlikely that the flight crew would have flown into the 100 mph updrafts that were only visible on the latter. Once again, state-of-the-art flight systems are shown to have limitations that are as much legislative as technological in nature.
June 8, 2009
I'm closing out this post today. Many bodies have been recovered, at tremendous expense. Per capita, I don't doubt the three governments will have spent more than the US did on weregild for 9/11 by the time this is all over. Obviously changes in procedures for transoceanic flights will result in the aftermath; see the link in the post title for some suggestions.
The fact that the bodies were found 45 miles farther down the track suggests that the computers on board the Airbus had pushed the craft to an unsustainable speed following faulty input from the frozen pitot tubes. For sure this will be changed, as this has happened before and will happen again if modern technology is not brought to bear on a 200 year old invention.
Having addressed these questions to the best of my ability, I will now leave the discussion to others.
And now I can start posting about something else again.
FIRST UPDATE April 2012
Well, it's been 10 months since the cockpit and data recorders were found, but the official report still hasn't been issued. Suffice it to say that there won't be a whole lot to add once it is. Flight 447 really was flown into the ocean, for the simple reason that the pilot kept the plane nose-up, at too high of an angle to sustain altitude, from 38,000 feet all the way down to sea level. He did this because the planes' computer was programmed in such a way that every time he lowered the nose, a warning sounded alerting him that the nose was too high. But when he raised the nose again, the alarm went silent. The flight crew, all during their 3 minutes of rapid descent, were being bombarded with frequent and often conflicting computer-generated warnings. The most effective way of dealing with them all appeared to be exactly what was done: flying the aircraft into the sea.
It has been said that all safety regulations are written in blood--the blood of those whose deaths showed the need for them. Inasmuch as aircraft engineers will now take a more human-centered approach to how a plane is flown in crisis situations, they both ensure that the passengers of Flight 477 did not die in vain, and show once more that in a crisis with massive equipment failure, no control system designed by the human brain has ever managed to improve on the human brain itself.
SECOND UPDATE June 2013
Looking back over this post, I see that I had given a scenario in which the plane fell apart at altitude. This clearly did not happen; passengers would have ridden in relative comfort all the way to the water's surface. However, the scenario in the cockpit is chilling in its resemblance to what happened in the final minute of Flight 3407's approach to Buffalo: amidst much confusion, as a stall warning horn broke the pilot out of his autopilot-induced lassitude, he gave the opposite control input needed to keep the plane in the air. Tragically, at the time Flight 447 went down, the "Lessons Learned" from Flight 3407 were yet to be published. The changes in aviation policy that have resulted from these closely related disasters could mean that from now on, pilots will finally be able to resist the urge to pull up on the stick when in a free fall at low airspeed due to icing.
THIRD UPDATE August 2013
I see that I was going to say more on the crash of Flight 508. I can't remember now what it was, although I have since learned that it set the task of Bible Translation in the Western Amazon Basin back by several months or years. Finally, it appears that the only thing that saved any of the passengers and crew on Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was a willingness of the pilot to take over from the computer before it flew the airplane into the ground. Unfortunately for those who were hurt in the crash, he was too late in taking over to completely prevent the plane from hitting a sea wall at the end of the runway.
FOURTH UPDATE March 2013
For those searching on information regarding Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, follow the links from this update.
FIFTH UPDATE December 2014
Whenever there is an air disaster, this page draws a lot of viewers. So I suppose I should briefly say something about Asia Air Flight 8501.
As with all breaking news stories, we are being fed a lot of disinformation. There were 40 bodies found. No, seven. No, six. Well, two were brought back to land. One was wearing a life jacket. No, it wasn't. And so on. About all I can say with confidence at this point, two days after the crash is:
1. It was weather-related. The plane, like Flight 447, was flying into a thunderstorm.
2. I'm sure that the altimeter problem on this Airbus had been fixed, but there was still the computer vs. pilot problem, and this being a cut-rate airline, I'm afraid the pilot wasn't up to the challenge.
3. There were no survivors.
Among the interesting bits of trivia, this flight having originated in an officially Muslim country:
1. Most of the passengers were Christian Indonesians.
2. Among the passengers was a family of Korean missionaries to Indonesia.
3. Despite there being no Americans on board, this disaster made front-page news in America.
SIXTH UPDATE May 21, 2016
With the demise of Egyptair Flight 804, we are getting used to the scenario of conflicting reports emerging from a search-and-rescue mission. What I should point out in relation to this is that search teams ALWAYS find debris in the area of a downed aircraft, for the simple reason that the ocean is full of it. Initial reports of crash-related debris are therefore almost always followed up by a retraction.
SEVENTH UPDATE: an historical account of the crash
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
Calvinism is not quite a Cult
In an earlier post, I addressed the question as to whether or not Calvinism was a cult. The comments I received tended rather strongly toward the negative, with Ruth A. Tucker declaring,
"Calvin certainly had an authoritarian way about him, but he wasn't a one man show as most cult leaders are."
It is true that Calvin shared much of his secular power with Farrel and the Geneva Council. But in matters of theology, Calvin, through the publication of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, stood alone. It is not for nothing that followers of Reformed Theology are called Calvinists to this day. There are no Farrelites, there is no Genevan Reformed Church. Pastors do not stock their libraries with The Complete Works of William Farrel, or, for that matter, the Complete Works of Jacobus Arminius--whose writings were eclipsed by those of a much later and more prolific theologian, John Wesley.
In his own lifetime, Calvin's theological writings attained the very status of holy writ, if not as infallible inspiration, at least as infallible interpretation. And this has not changed; rather than going out of print, Calvin's Institutes has generated its own line of translations, versions, commentaries, and reader's guides--just as has the Bible itself. And this is a classic sign of a cult--elevating their guru's teachings to the level of Scripture.
Another sign of a cult is elevating the guru himself to the very apex of the ecclesiastical hierarchy--a man without equals. This is especially easy to do if the leader is dead, and doesn't have to fit a particular spot in the pecking order. Notice how Doug Phillips personifies the biblical and materialistic world views as a battle between--not Jesus--but Calvin and Darwin. Apparently Calvin was the Last of the Prophets, with no one having arisen since him who could take on the Giant of Galapagos.
Dr. Tucker is right, to a point; Calvinism doesn't quite fit the sociological description of a cult, as there never really has been any position at the top of its hierarchy. But in theological matters, one man still rules supreme, though from the grave. There's no question in Doug Phillips' mind: John Calvin, "Weighing in at five hundred years," is still a one-man show.
"Calvin certainly had an authoritarian way about him, but he wasn't a one man show as most cult leaders are."
It is true that Calvin shared much of his secular power with Farrel and the Geneva Council. But in matters of theology, Calvin, through the publication of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, stood alone. It is not for nothing that followers of Reformed Theology are called Calvinists to this day. There are no Farrelites, there is no Genevan Reformed Church. Pastors do not stock their libraries with The Complete Works of William Farrel, or, for that matter, the Complete Works of Jacobus Arminius--whose writings were eclipsed by those of a much later and more prolific theologian, John Wesley.
In his own lifetime, Calvin's theological writings attained the very status of holy writ, if not as infallible inspiration, at least as infallible interpretation. And this has not changed; rather than going out of print, Calvin's Institutes has generated its own line of translations, versions, commentaries, and reader's guides--just as has the Bible itself. And this is a classic sign of a cult--elevating their guru's teachings to the level of Scripture.
Another sign of a cult is elevating the guru himself to the very apex of the ecclesiastical hierarchy--a man without equals. This is especially easy to do if the leader is dead, and doesn't have to fit a particular spot in the pecking order. Notice how Doug Phillips personifies the biblical and materialistic world views as a battle between--not Jesus--but Calvin and Darwin. Apparently Calvin was the Last of the Prophets, with no one having arisen since him who could take on the Giant of Galapagos.
Dr. Tucker is right, to a point; Calvinism doesn't quite fit the sociological description of a cult, as there never really has been any position at the top of its hierarchy. But in theological matters, one man still rules supreme, though from the grave. There's no question in Doug Phillips' mind: John Calvin, "Weighing in at five hundred years," is still a one-man show.
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