Another Plane Down in New York 1113
Another plane has crashed, this time in Queens. You can read a blurb at Yahoo.
CNN.com isn't responding for me. LaGuardia, Newark and JFK are closed now. Update: 11/12 14:54 GMT by T : New reports indicate that the plane was departing from JFK, not arriving. Also, CNN has confirmed that this was American Airlines flight 587, an Airbus A 300. Update: 11/12 14:57 GMT by T : Further information is that the plane was en route to the Dominican Republic, and that the disaster actually involves two crash sites, not just one -- an engine fell from the plane some distance from the fuselage.
Re:unbelievable (Score:2, Interesting)
I can see the smoke (Score:4, Interesting)
Newssites quickly went to light - Dow-Jones faster (Score:2, Interesting)
They have obviously learned from prior experiences.
Dow Jones however dropped 200 points faster than any newssite could update their pages. Consider the impact on US-airtraffic.
Wonder how much time it will take until someone goes bankrupt and wether it will be a US or some other national agency that drops first.
Rangle
Latest - Reuters report a JFK machanic arrested (Score:0, Interesting)
better response time (Score:2, Interesting)
Highly suspect article (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:bandwidth/capacity (Score:3, Interesting)
The sad thing is that it's probably not cost-effective. The only time I've seen this happen is when it's been news so big (WTC and this recent crash) that I've heard about it even though I'm at work. On average, it seems that news big enough to get transmitted through the school/office grapevine happens less frequently than yearly. It's things like:
I'm probably leaving some out, as my memory isn't the best, but these things are infrequent occurances. Unfortunately, news sites have to worry about doing what turns a profit. CNN is, at least, transferring servers over from less critical departments (such as Cartoon Network), but it's hard for them to justify having servers there that're idle 99+% of the time.
It's a shame there's not a technology-based solution that automatically kicks in for obscenely popular sites. Some sort of popular site caching mechanism or a P2P system might do the trick (and provide a more legitimate use for P2P technologies). Such a system would also help out in non-emergency situations, such as when a given novelty site gets its 15 minutes of Internet fame.
Re:thats the thing.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Aerial Photo (Score:2, Interesting)
Other Airbus crashes (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:An engine -fell off- the plane??? (Score:2, Interesting)
this is the main difference between Boeing and Airbus as for the conception:
On Boeing planes, the engine is kept very hard tightened to the wing, and is expected to behave as a "cushion" when the plane crashes
On Airbus planes, the engine is expected to detach from the wing when the plane crashes, to avoid that the wing breaks and goes into fire.
That said, you can guess that the link between wing and engine is checked very often and very carefully on every plane...
Now we should wait for the explanation of what really happened, because for now, there is no satisfactory plain and certain explanation.
Everything is possible, but we have to be sure (as for birds, engines are designed as well not to go into fire when a bird goes thru it.. now, for 3 or 4 birds at the same time, or a big bird, it's another story)
The Facts (Score:1, Interesting)
There've been 12 Airbus crashes since 1988 (1 of those was during a engine failure simulation). None of them were landing or flying from the US (bbc article here [bbc.co.uk]).
New York is obviously a major target for air terror. If you consider the probabilities, the most likely is an act of terror. Just my 2c.
an accident? (Score:1, Interesting)
if an engine came off before the crash [which could be caused by or cause the explosion] that's damned unlikely. twa800 and that dc10 years ago are the only similar events i can think of right now.
more likely that instead of trying the harder method of hijacking and aiming an airliner at a building, just explode one on takeoff from NY. the area and amount of gas involved will have the same effect post sept11: terror.
i'm not fear mongering: the way to react to terrorism is to face it and remain calm.
that's not easy. it's not meant to be easy. it's the only answer though.
hard times. speak truth to power.
comments from an airline pilot on Spain's TVE (Score:2, Interesting)
One Captain Marchessi was interviewed live over the telephone on Spain's national television, TVE. He said (and I am paraphrasing here) that Airbus planes are designed to survive the loss of an engine, and that pilots are trained for precisely such an eventuality; therefore, he believes, it is unlikely that the loss of thrust alone would have caused the plane to crash. (To his credit, he declined to speculate further despite pressure from the reporter.)
Now, can somebody tell me whether the phrase "the loss of an engine" in this context could mean the physical loss of the engine? Or is it just an idiom meaning "the loss of an engine's thrust"? I mean -- are these planes really designed to account for the possible dettachment of an engine?
Possible cause (Score:5, Interesting)
Only if you live in NorthEast (Score:3, Interesting)
I dunno about that... I don't live anywhere near NYC, and talking to real people (i.e. not listening to people on TV) I haven't heard of anyone actually being scared. If you look at the big picture, there really isn't much widescale "terror" to the terrorism; the country is just too big.
Get away from the northeastern USA, and the only way the terrorism is really affecting most people's lives, is the reaction that it has provoked from the government. The actual plane crashes themselves are just Yet Another television thing.
That must sound really weird or insensitive to New Yorkers, I guess. But it's true.
Re:the razor of logic says... (Score:3, Interesting)
But as H.L. Mencken said, for every problem there is a solution that is both simple and wrong.
Until further evidence, though, it is better to approach this as a 'normal' air disaster while posting a Lemur to watch for any other threats. This is what the government has done, New York has gone into emergency mode (good idea) but nationally we need to see that this is just like any other air disaster - saddening but not an attack.
But it does make you think.... (Score:2, Interesting)
NYC - prior target.
Outbound flight loaded with fuel presumably.
I've heard their was a meeting of a bunch of arab leaders to discuss the fate of Afghanistan at the UN.
I've also heard (CBC) that Rudy Giuliani (sp?) and Pres Perwez Musharef (sp?) were to tour Ground Zero more or less at the time of the accident.
Also the district where things landed is a shopping district - another symbol of capitalism.
And the eyewitnesses have reported seeing flames from the planes sides. I'm imagining a bomb or a bit of sabotage could easily have caused such an effect.
According to an aviation expert from the USA, interviewed by CBC, the Airbus has a very good safety record and there haven't been (with US carrier's Airbuses anyway) any accidents of this nature.
Now, this doesn't prove anything. In fact, it doesn't even produce a convincing allegation. But it is certainly an interesting combination of facts. If it is mechanical failure not caused by any hostile agency, then it is just an ugly coincidence and NYC is just having more than its fair share of horrendous luck.
I'll be anxious to see how this all comes out in the wash.
And I extend my sympathies to anyone affected directly by this tragedy. Regardless of how it came to be, it is quite horrific.
Tomb
Re:An engine -fell off- the plane??? (Score:1, Interesting)
A300-600 Aft Engine Mount Failure [italianfli...mittee.org]
A300/A310 Aft mount structures are certified 'safe life'
Other AIB aircraft are certified 'fail safe'.
In summer 1997, a separation of an Aft Mount Left Hand Side link was discovered during aircraft overhaul on an early A310-200 (MSN370) operated by THY airlines.
Rampant speculation is a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Soo... how come no one's talking about Stingers yet? Is everyone taking those 5-point don't-jump-to-conclusions posts seriously? Gimme a break, those are karma whores, through and through. Speculation is where the fun is.
Here's something to think about, even if it turns out to be completely unrelated to what happened today: the resistance against the Soviets had shoulder-launched SAMs. They were trained how to use them, and used them effectively.
Commercial aircraft take off on very predictable routes. It should be pretty easy to find an optimum firing position within a few miles of an airport, and park your car. You can study the pattern for weeks if you like. Then a plane goes right over your, you open the trunk, take out your Stinger, and shoot the slow-moving low-altitude plane (with nice hot engines at full takeoff power) in the back.
Total security checkpoints you had to go through: zero, except when you smuggled the US-made SAM back into the country. (Or maybe you can even make your own right here -- the Sidewinder budget in the 50s was supposedly really low, and stuff that was cheap in the 50s is nearly free today). And you can do the shooting so fast, there might not even be any witnesses.
Defending against that sort of thing is going to be tricky.
A300 - Software "Fly by Wire" (Score:1, Interesting)
Catastrophic bird strike caused crash? (Score:5, Interesting)
While a lot of people a angling towards the idea of a terrorist action, I think there's one possibility that no one has yet discussed: mechanical failure caused by a catastrophic bird strike.
Far-fetched? Not if you know something about the geography and ecology at JFK Airport and Jamaica Bay. To the west and south of JFK Airport is a very large marshy area that serves as a sanctuary for migratory birds (plus some native waterfowl). This means at this time of the year--when birds are migrating south for the winter--there will be millions of birds out in this sanctuary.
What happens when you have flocks of birds rising by the thousands getting in the way of the flight path of an airliner taking off out into Jamaica Bay? My guess is that American Airlines Flight 857 may have flown in to a very large flock of birds just after take off, mean the plane's two GE CF6-80 engines may be ingested 40 or more birds per engine somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds. That many birds being ingested will seriously damage the front engine blades, and such a severe bird ingestion may be enough to cause a catastrophic fan section failure, which can spew out very sharp engine fan blades at supersonic speeds, possibly breaking through the engine nacelle and hitting the fuselage, wing flap control lines and wing fuel tanks, which explains the fire on the wings that eyewitnesses saw.
Eyewitnesses said that the plane flew very low before the plane lost one of its engines and then crashed down at a sharp angle. This sounds consistent with the plane suffering a catastrophic bird strike.
If anyone remembers, some years ago an E-3A Sentry AWACS plane crashed aftering taking off from Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage, AK after the engines failed due to a catastrophic bird ingestion problem. AA Flight 857 may have suffered a similar unfortunate fate.
Fuel dumped? (Score:2, Interesting)
Regardless, it shows last-minute straight-thinking on the pilot's part. The fire on the ground could have been much worse.