Whatever Happened to Flight 370? And what can be done about it?

Back in 2009 when I started writing on air disasters, even a plane flying into the middle of the ocean could expect to be found within days, its black box recovered even from the bottom of the abyss. Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 has changed all that; three years after it disappeared from radar, no crash scene has ever been identified, nor will it probably ever be found using currently available technology. When whoever was at the controls of MH370 made its final turn into the Indian Ocean, it was with the intention that the plane never be seen again.

I have written on this air disaster before, both five days and nine months after it was first reported. I haven't had anything further to report, until now. While I stay with my original theory that MH370 was hijacked, I've let go of my secondary theory, that the USA was behind its disappearance; I've now run across a much more likely theory.

There is no question, now, that some sinister person was at the controls of MH370 at the time the transponder was turned off just after clearing Malaysian traffic control; the only question has been, who? The general consensus seems to focus on the pilot, based mainly on three lines of evidence:

1. The plane had to have been taken over by someone aboard. Since Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was the last voice heard just before the plane went dark, under this scenario he took control of the plane, dismissed the copilot, locked the cockpit door (another unintended consequence of post-9/11 regulation is that a member of the flight crew can now hijack his own flight unimpeded), turned off all communication devices, flew the plane into radar dead zones along international borders, and turned left to fly southward across the Indian ocean until the plane's fuel was exhausted. Prime evidence for this scenario is that Zaharie had cleared his social calendar following the flight.

2. The Inmarsat satellite system picked up ACARS signals that, as interpreted, indicated that MH370 continued on a southern track until 8:19 am.

3. A piece of a Boeing 777 wing floated ashore Reunion Island in July 2015. A part number inside the piece was traced back to the airplane lost on March 8, 2014. Another identified piece of the aircraft was found on Pemba Island in June 2016.

Now, taken together, these three lines of evidence are extremely damning. There is now only one other scenario that fits the evidence, and it hugely fails Occam's Razor. It was proposed in a book I read recently by Jeff Wise. Its scenario is that the two Ukrainian nationals aboard MH370 were Russian agents disguised as scuba divers, who used their carry-on oxygen tanks to stay alive while commandeering the plane via its. The agent inside the electronics control center turned off oxygen to the cockpit and decompressed the plane, resulting in the deaths of the flight crew. He then not only reprogrammed the autopilot, but tampered with the ACARS signal in such a way as to send a false signal that the plane was headed south, when in fact it was headed northeast, toward the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan--which it reached after several hours, at the end of its fuel endurance, having evaded the military radars of several more countries along the way. To compound the difficulty of this scenario, the Russians would then have had to dispose of all the crew and passengers' bodies, and part out the plane so they could then dump pieces of it at an appropriate location in the Southern Indian Ocean--where submarines would have had to broadcast phony pings from the plane's black boxes. Jeff Wise didn't have a convincing reason why Russia would go to all this work, and all evidence that has come to light since his book came out has made his scenario less and less likely.

I'm going to go with the pilot-suicide theory, and note that the overwhelming majority of deaths attributed to pilot suicide--not even including the 9/11 flights--resulted from Muslim pilots flying their planes into the ocean. Now that it's so easy for a pilot to fly his plane into the sea, this is what I would recommend: Putting a device outside the cockpit by which cabin crew can communicate directly with authorities, and rolling back regulations that make the airline cockpit such an impenetrable fortress, so that non-suicidal crew members can not only report the attempted murder-suicide, but actually do something to thwart it. In the meantime, you may want to avoid flying with certain flag carriers.

Update 2019: The Atlantic wraps up the story with all the available evidence compiled to date, especially the flotsam being found wherever Gibson looks for it.

Aslan is on the move!

After one hundred years of always winter and never Christmas (as unlikely as such a situation is to conceive, without total starvation), things seemed as grim as they could get. Of the four humans sent into Narnia for some unknown purpose, one had already defected to the White Witch, and the other three were being hunted for their very lives. The beaver's home had been raided and his comrades turned to stone. How much worse could it get? Yet it was being whispered that despite all the bad tidings, a fundamental shift was taking place: Aslan was on the move!

Things are pretty discouraging right now on the front of religious liberty in the Western Hemisphere.  Whispers come at us from every direction. Whispers of Ken Miller being threatened with more hard time for refusing to testify against Philip. Whispers of Timo Miller being dragged off his bicycle on a Nicaraguan street into a waiting van and hauled off to who-know-where--perhaps the notorious Chipote Prison? Whispers of Interpol being involved, but no one willing to confirm anything officially. It's looking pretty grim.

Aslan is on the move. Yes, there is yet no outward evidence of it--only those whose undying loyalty he holds can sense it. But as the cycles of time wheel around to line up in their ultimate configuration, the current regime under which the whole world groans is developing unseen cracks. It's going down.

At first it may only look like a thaw, but Spring is coming; nothing can hold it back.

Take heart. Stand firm. Aslan is on the move.

UPDATE August 17: To those of you, especially in Nicaragua, coming here for an update on Timo Miller, I'm not going to be sharing everything I know. You probably have access to pretty much the same sources I do, and things are too up in the air to be drawing any conclusions from the data that is available. The main point is that while we may not know what is going on, God does. I will say I expect that when the kidnapping trial opens in Buffalo in the coming weeks, Timo will be present.

Where is Malaysian Airlines Flight 370?

In two earlier posts, I analysed the demise of Air France Flight 447. For the last few days the posts have been getting a lot of traffic, so I updated them with reference to Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. Since we are now in the fifth day of this saga--long enough to have been told that many of the preliminary reports were wrong--I'll take a stab at analysing this disaster. I'm sure there will be several updates, which we shall add as information is received.

First of all, once thing is absolutely certain: The 227 passengers on board (minus the hijackers themselves) were kidnapped at 1:40 am on Saturday, March 8. That wasn't obvious at the time, but it should have been obvious by the time Malaysian Airlines declared the plane missing, an hour after it was to have entered the approach pattern to land in Beijing.

Here's what happened in the first hour of the planes' flight--the only hour we know anything about:

At 12:41 am Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, pilot of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 9M-MRO, received clearance to take off from the control tower at Kuala Lampur International Airport. The plane continued to climb out under the control of Departure Control, and set course for Waypoint IGARI, at 6° 56' 12N 103° 35' 6E in the Gulf of Thailand. National Air Traffic Control Centre assistant director Siti Sarah Lebai Abu guided the flight until turning it over to the National Air Traffic Control of Vietnam.

It was at that moment that Siti claims to have noticed that Flight 370's transponder blinked out. This should have been a cause for alarm: jet aircraft are required to keep their transponders on at all times, and transponder failure constitutes an in-flight emergency. But no alarm was raised. Vietnam's NATC never heard from flight 370. One hour into its flight, it was already missing at sea.

And at that point our knowledge of Flight 370 ends, five days in. There are scattered reports that a plane was picked up on radar in the Indian Ocean, clear on the other side of Malaysia. Or that one was heard as it passed over the eastern coast. Or that cell phones of passengers continued to ring hours after it would have run out of fuel. But none of this tells us where 9M-MRO went, or where it is now. With the fuel on board, it could have flown as far as Pakistan--or into the middle of the Indian Ocean.

The last time a plane left its flight course and went dark on the radar screens was September 11, 2001, when it happened to four different planes, all at about the same time. So we can't say that this has never happened before. What we can say is that every time this has happened, it was the result of a hijacking.

[Random] Thoughts on the Latest Chechen Terrorist Bombing

Well, I've spent the better part of the day following the Boston Marathon Explosion, and have tried to pull back a couple of times and think this through. Some questions have finally been answered, such as:

Was this an attack by undercover agents of a foreign government, or Americans? Americans.
Did the perpetrators skip the country immediately, as foreigners were, or stay local? They were locals.
Were they using sophisticated military-grade explosives, or IED's? They used pressure-cooker IED's.
Was this an isolated attack, or part of a general war on America?

Aha. Now once we get to this question, it gets a little stickier. That the two bombing suspects are also accused of robbing a 7/11 would indicate that this wasn't an isolated incident, while on the other hand it also pretty much guarantees that they were lone wolves. Somebody being funded by an outside agency isn't going to resort to armed robbery to raise cash, especially not in their own local neighborhood.

On the other hand, this also demonstrates once again (The Beltway Sniper did if for us a decade ago) that a single pair of terrorists can literally immobilize a major metropolitan region. This was the first time probably since the Revolutionary War that the entire city of Boston was, to some extent or another, under a 24-hour curfew. I believe it's also the first time tanks have been used on American streets. And all this, brought on by a few household chemicals and easily obtained handguns.

Just imagine what this country would look like if, instead of a couple of Muslims taking out their religious angst on the Great Satan, a couple dozen--or couple hundred--gun owners methodically took out their rage on a government that tried to disarm them.

That thought must give the gun-grabbers a churning feeling in the pits of their stomachs.

I should add that although these Chechen terrorists are in fact Americans local to the Boston area, their father at least lives back in the Caucuses, and was hoping to see them there this summer. Muslim Americans who regularly travel to terror-stricken regions of the globe to visit Muslim members should probably be rated considerably higher on the suspect list for crimes like these than non-Muslim Americans who like to blow up stumps on the back 40. A mass-murdering terrorist could emerge from either group, but one is way more likely than the other.

April 20:
Well, I have a few more thoughts. One, if somebody did put these guys up to it, they cut them off after the bombing; these guys were out of cash and desperate to clear town.
Secondly, these guys were determined not to be taken alive.
Thirdly, the FBI is probably going to scale back their terrorist conspiracy sting program. There's a least a hint that this may have been a sting gone terribly wrong when they hired someone actually capable of pulling it off.

Okay, here's a report showing it most likely that Tamerlan at least was a stooge for the FBI. His brother most likely was just going along with him.

UPDATE AUGUST 2013:
More information has come out on the details, but not such as would change the overall picture; for example, their mother also lives in the FSU, and apparently it was only Tamerlan who was determined not to be taken alive; his brother was shot while unarmed and unthreatening. 

USA trained Iranian assasins at secret camp in Nevada

The story is all on this blog.

Coming up: 1000 more casualties of Death Penalty legislation

Joel Rosenberg writes:

IDF soldier Gilad Shalit was released Tuesday in a deal brokered by Egypt. He had been held by Hamas for a horrifying 1,941 days after being captured on June 25, 2006 in an attack that triggered the Second Lebanon War. The deal is not without controversy, however. Israel has released 477 Palestinian prisoners in the first swap, and will ultimately release more than 1,000. Some have been involved in deadly attacks on Israeli citizens. Not a few Israelis are deeply concerned these terrorists will be back to capture, torture and kill more Israelis soon.

Many of these murderers have been in prison for decades, and now that they are able to do get back to doing what they do best, we can expect at least a thousand more Israelis to be murdered. All this, because Israelis, through their elected representatives in the Knesset, have chosen to eliminate the chance that any murderer will ever face execution for his crimes. And now that this system has proved to work so well, I can hardly imagine it will be another 25 years before the next Gilad Shalit is traded back on such lucrative terms.

This case also represents the fallacy of "life in prison without possibility of parole," the imparted sentence of these now-free murderers. There is at least on American still in prison who was sentenced to death for murder prior to 1967 (when the Supreme Court denied the right of states to execute their murderers), but I can't find evidence of any person still in prison who was sentenced in the decades prior to 1967 to "life in prison without possibility of parole." As far as I have been able to determine, all such cases did in fact lead to eventual release of the prisoner, if he didn't die young before they quite got around to releasing him.

Why you WILL need off-grid capability

President Obama admits it--China has hacked into the nation's power grid and can turn it off at will.

You'd better have an alternate source of power, because sooner of later you WILL need to use it.

Standing by for the REAL Y2K.

Are saggy pants really a threat to airline safety?

A dispute that began after a passenger refused to pull up his sagging pants led to his arrest and removal from a plane at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday, police said.

Deshon Marman, 20, a University of New Mexico football player . . . was being held at San Mateo County Jail on suspicion of trespassing, battery and resisting arrest.

Not to mention all the passengers that were ordered off the plane so he could be arrested in private.

Clearly, the War Against Terror, as it is waged by the TSA, is nothing but a war against individual liberty, with millions of innocent Americans as its victims.

Lisa Miller updates

The following information is from an interview Lisa Miller gave in 2008:

-Janet Jenkins did not think she would be able to bond with Isabella because she was not her own flesh.
-Lisa was a foster parent at the time she became pregnant with Isabella and had to give the child up.
Janet said of Isabella; "I don’t want to have any responsibility for her – she’s not my child but I just want to see her once in a while."
-Janet told Lisa she wanted to kill her. This was when Lisa left the relationship.
-Janet requested that their civil union be dissolved so she could file for bankruptcy.
-Lisa is the only one named on Isabella's birth certificate; there is no mention of Janet Jenkins.

And in further news:
During the last month the US detectives, the US embassy people and the local police have been harassing the Jinotega brethren. (They have also questioned [Timo's parents] and two of Timo’s brothers.) They are constantly watching and trailing the Jinotega brethren and again and again ask them a lot of questions. They have even said that if they do not help them find out where Lisa is, they could deport some of them, or put them in jail or do what the local police do here when they investigate. (And that is not nice. It's a vicious threat!) They are not very nice about the whole thing and almost force people to talk. This has been a very tiring time for the brethren there.

Toward the beginning of all this they had come to the Jinotega school/church house combination to pick Lisa up, but God had sent her away already. Later they brought in a bunch of Special Forces to invade the house she had been living in. But she was gone.

Fourth Amendment: RIP

In what could easily become a weekly series of posts called "One More Step in the Descent to a Police State," I here note that the TSA has nullified a bill in the Texas legislature that would make it a felony for TSA workers to sexually molest travelers, by threatening to ban all flights to Texas if it were passed.

And the Indiana Supreme Court has already banned citizens from protecting themselves against such assault.

Obama said he'd bring change.

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

The White Man makes the Black List

This blog has a growing following--even attracting the attention of the US House of Representatives, the US Defense Department, and the ACLU, to name just a few of the organizations that have shown up on our site meter. And we just helped shut down a scam on Facebook. So we will do our best to keep producing posts of interest. And this blog will continue to offer both this poster and any commenters the opportunity to express themselves anonymously.

Why, you may ask, do we insist on anonymity? Well, let this article serve as an answer:

* * * * * *
Intimidating Critics of Islam
Politicians and citizens who raise questions about the religion are targeted.
By former Senator Rick Santorum
Posted: Thursday, February 12, 2009


ARTICLE
Philadelphia Inquirer
Publication Date: February 12, 2009


We lost more than a million jobs in the past few months, the headlines remind us. So last month's story about a Dutch court's ruling that Geert Wilders was "inciting hatred and discrimination" - and that "it is in the public interest to prosecute" him - understandably didn't make the American news.

Did Wilders rip off a minority in a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme? No, he's a member of the Dutch parliament, and his precise villainy was releasing a 15-minute film. Entitled Fitna, it suggests a direct link between certain verses of the Koran and acts of terrorism.

Not to be outdone, the United Kingdom this week banned Wilders from entering the country. Its reasoning: His "presence in the U.K. would pose a genuine, present, and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society." A letter from the home secretary went on to tell Wilders that "your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security."

In 2007, Cambridge University Press destroyed unsold copies of Alms for Jihad after it was sued by Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi-Irish businessman whom the book accused of financing al-Qaeda. So much for academics standing up against book-burning.

In 2005, reporters from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten were forced into hiding after publishing a series of 12 cartoons about Muhammad. Islamic fundamentalists found the images blasphemous and threatened to bomb the paper's offices and kill its cartoonists - apparently, in certain quarters, an alternative to a letter to the editor.

Last year, at the urging of the Canadian Islamic Congress, author Mark Steyn was forced to defend himself against charges of racism and "Islamophobia" that were filed with three Canadian human-rights commissions, based on his columns in Maclean's magazine.

And, following a 2008 U.N. resolution urging nations to outlaw "defamation of religion," several nations - including Italy, the Netherlands and France - are attempting to ban "hate speech" against religious groups.

All of these incidents are calculated to intimidate critics of Islam in Europe and across the West. The message in the European Union is clear: Politicians, religious figures, and even private citizens with religiously and politically incorrect opinions will be subject not only to Muslim protest, but to criminal prosecution and violent retribution.

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And yes, this blog has been displayed numerous times on computers located on the Arabian Peninsula. Enough said.

What I look forward to in an Obama Presidency

The White Man has voted for the President of the United States only twice. That is to say, two different men have attained (or retained) the presidency, having done so in part due to a single vote cast in their favor by The White Man.

The White Man has cast a losing vote for President once. That is to say, his choice for the Presidency (who had not been his first choice, but rather the lesser of two evils) was not the choice of enough other voting Americans to allow him to win the election.

The White Man has voted 'Present' in one Presidential Election. That is to say, he voted, but left the line for "President" blank, not being able to hold his nose tightly enough to take responsibility for electing the lesser of two evils. As it turned out, that would have been a losing vote anyway.

The White Man, no longer a registered voter, has therefore abstained from all subsequent Presidential Elections.

So I write on the topic of this November's Election from the standpoint of an outside, dispassionate observer.

Sixteen years ago, I looked forward to a Clinton Presidency. I hoped that a Democrat President would be able to push through some badly-needed bills that had been held up by a Democrat Congress. Whether he was successful or not may yet remain to be seen.

A year ago, I again looked forward to a Clinton Presidency and the return of Bill Clinton to the White House, this time as First Gentleman. But things have changed, and a Clinton Presidency is no longer in the cards for 2009. Barack Obama, scion of the Chicago Political Machine, has pulled his usual trick of procedurally eliminating his more popular opponent, and we face the likelihood of an Obama Presidency for the next eight years.

We are, in fact, in a very similar place as we were sixteen years ago. After several years of prosperity, the economy is slumping. "Inflation" is a problem. Taxes are high. The Democrat Candidate promises to stimulate the economy, tame "inflation," and raise taxes. I foresaw that Clinton would in fact increase inflation, and bought gold as a hedge against that likelihood. As it turned out, the tax decreases of the early 80's finally kicked in about the time Bush Sr. left office, bringing in a wave of prosperity fueled by the increased productivity of the Computer Age. Bush's and Clinton's tax increases are what have brought us to where we are today, fueled by the housing bubble brought on by the stupidity of sub-prime mortgages backed by the full currency-printing power of the US Government.

So what do I look forward to in an Obama Presidency?

For one, I look to see the printing presses shift into an even higher gear, with the demise of the penny coming by the end of a second Obama administration. I kind of doubt, though, that we will ever see the $1000 bill again; cash transactions will be more and more restricted.

I expect the federal deficit to double.

I expect, by the end the first Obama administration, to see Social Security Numbers made mandatory for medical treatment.

I expect to see more raids on religious groups, with all the children taken away from their parents regardless of any evidence of abuse.

I expect to see all churches lose more tax exemptions, or more churches lose all.

I expect riots should Obama fail by a thin margin to be re-elected.

I expect some well-placed Americans to be held hostage in a rogue state for years.

What good do I expect to come out of an Obama Presidency?

One thing: I hope that the Multi-level marketers who have hitched their hopes to the Republican Party will receive their comeuppance.

I hope, but unlike my other predictions, I hardly expect.

Was Eric Rudolph the Olympic Park Bomber?

Final Edition
Many of my readers will remember the 1996 Olympic Bombing in Atlanta. Suspicion immediately focused, of all things, on the security guard who discovered the bomb. This is somewhat akin to blaming the Pearl Harbor attack on the radar operator who reported the incoming bombers. With such an approach, it's no wonder it took prosecutors nine years to put the case to rest. . .

Law enforcement officials have a hard time. They are authorized--yea, encouraged--to deceive, intimidate, and deprive suspects in hopes of tricking them into making a confession. What they aren't allowed to do is simply to ask nicely for one (Miranda vs. Arizona). This is unfortunate, as it only encourages the suspect to say what he thinks they want to hear, rather than giving them what they won't give him--the truth. And it encourages a suspect who would have been likely to give them the truth, had he been asked, to refuse to say anything. Such was the case with Richard Jewell, who was eager to help solve the crime he had been the first to discover--until he realized the he was being deceitfully manipulated into confessing the crime himself.

The FBI suspected that Richard fit the "lone bomber" profile. This was preposterous, for the following reasons:

1) The bomb detonated at Centennial Park was a masterpiece of design. Somebody whose career has consisted of writing parking tickets is not going to have any idea of how to make a highly technical bomb. Somebody, on the other hand, who spent time in the airborne infantry would. Strike one for clueless investigators: Richard Jewell had no military experience.

1) Richard Jewell's background and training was that of a security guard and a police officer. This is not the sort of person who commits mass murder on the sly. Police officers are paid well, and like to keep their jobs and pension plans. Police officers are trained to prevent casualties and investigate explosions. Contrast this to a soldier: soldiers are focused on maximizing causalities, and don't get any training on how explosions are investigated--just on how they are carried out. Strike two for clueless investigators: again, Richard Jewell had NO MILITARY TRAINING!

Now, have you ever wondered why they call those outposts in Afghanistan "Terrorist TRAINING Camps?" Could it be because terrorists, in order to be effective, first need to be TRAINED?

One begins to suspect that none of the FBI agents assigned to the case had ever humped a pack on a 25-mile hike.

Given their cluelessness in the initial stages of the investigation, and the way they focused on entrapping Richard Jewell into confessing rather than investigating the crime itself, I was not impressed, years later, when authorities linked Eric Rudolph to the Olympic bombing.

Like accusing one of the investigators of the crime, it just didn't make sense. Rudolph was a crusader; his focus in recent years had been on targeting abortionists and their henchmen. The Olympics had nothing whatsoever to do with such a one-man crusade, and it just seemed par for the course for the FBI to jump at the chance of pinning the bombing on a suspect who wasn't available to defend himself.

Imagine my surprise, then, when, after his eventual apprehension by a rookie small-town cop on the lookout for teenage vandals, Eric Rudolph confessed to the Olympic Park Bombing. I still wasn't convinced; knowing the tactics used so far in this case, I expected this was probably a coerced confession. After all, he was already implicated in one murder, and given the public mood in the South at the time, would never see freedom again anyway. They actually execute abortionist assassins down there!

But Eric Rudolph, now safely ensconced at the country's only Super-Max facility, has written in detail as to why he set the bomb at Centennial Park. It was, as he tells it, actually just a trial run in his one-man crusade against abortionist and their fellow-travelers. Not wanting to hurt any innocent bystanders--then or later--he called in the bomb threat an hour before it was set to go off, so as to ensure that only investigators would be around when it blew. But alas, he hadn't counted on the dismal incompetence of the Atlanta 911 dispatch system; the first dispatcher hung up on him, and the second time he called the dispatcher failed to catch the location of the bomb. So it was that Richard Jewell discovered the bomb a full 10 minutes before the authorities finally received word that it was about to go off. Instead of killing the investigating policemen he expected, Eric Rudolph's first bomb injured 100 innocent bystanders, one of whom subsequently died. Hearing of the explosion on the news, a frustrated Rudolph set off the rest of his stock of bombs in a deserted area and fled the scene

Having cut short his career as a terrorist, Eric Rudolph narrowed his focus, culminating in attacks only on abortion providers and their protectors: first on policemen investigating an explosion, and, when that failed to produce the right kind of casualties, directly on the abortion clinic security guard investigating the remotely detonated explosive device that then took his life.

By all definitions, Eric Rudolph was a terrorist in 1996. His attack on Centennial Park was only remotely related to his military objective of eliminating elective abortion in the US. But the shock of seeing his attack succeed instantly cured him of his terrorist tendencies. The bombing in which he was eventually implicated for first degree murder was not a work of terrorism, but a targeted assassination.

For his involvement in the Olympic Park Bombing, it is accurate to refer to Eric Rudolph as a terrorist. But to use that term to describe his later career is inaccurate and misleading. He is, and always has been throughout his post-military career, a crusader: one who attempts, through military means, to drive the infidels from the holy land. America is his holy land; rampant fornicators are his infidels.

Yes, Eric Rudolph was the Olympic Park Bomber. But this act of terrorism was an aberration in his long career as a crusader, and the term should not be attached to him as descriptive of his standard operating procedure. Never again did he place a bomb where it would be likely to injure an innocent bystander.

That, by the way, is why those who insist on keeping the term "American terrorist" in his Wikipedia biography are wrong.

And it is because of them that I wrote this article. I hope they read it.