Posted on 04/11/2007 4:21:27 PM PDT by Cornpone
Tel Aviv - Israeli warplanes nearly shot down an American airliner carrying passengers from New York to Tel Aviv on Wednesday when the pilot failed to respond as the plane approached the Israeli coast, an airport authority official said.
Two Israeli F-15s and two F-16s fighter planes were scrambled to intercept a Boeing 777 operated by the US Continental Airlines as it prepared to enter Israeli airspace without responding to control tower demands to identify itself, the official added.
According to Israel's private Channel-10, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, defence minister Amir Peretz and General Gaby Ashkenazy, chief of staff, were warned that the air force was on the point of shooting down a civilian plane suspected of being in the hands of hijackers.
The Boeing pilot at the last minute realised the situation and the danger threatening his craft and established contact while still over the Mediterranean.
Escorted by the warplanes, the Boeing landed without further problems at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport where an inquiry was opened.
According to another story, the Israeli jets escorted the airliner away from Israel to the west until contact was reestablished. I doubt that they almost shot the plane down.
Nice to see the Israeli pilots are on guard, to bad the Continental pilot was not. Scary stuff!
if it had been shot down you can bet the gov. would blame a center fuel tank explosion or some such bullsh$t.
Perhaps they thought Nancy Pelosi was on board.
How soon will the passengers start legal proceedings against the pilot, crew, and Continental?
Only if they hit it in the center fuel tank and it exploded.
Remember the WTC was blown down.
There was no plane at the Pentagon.
The Earth is flat.
I have the feeling that a certain Continental Airlines pilot will soon be taking an early retirement.
USS Liberty, anyone?
What about it?
Don’t most commercial planes have a transponder they can squawk to identify themselves? Is there any way that transponder could be prompted from the ground, so as to avoid these kinds of mishaps? A “ping” is sent to the transponder, which responds with its own “ping.” Something like that?
ping
Thankfully nothing happened. A pilot is going to lose his job however.
Is Israel just as strong as the U.S.?
ATC assigns a transponder code that is set by the pilot on initial contact. Until the code is assigned and entered into the transponder, the aircraft is a blip on the radar without ID.
The headline in the original story this afternoon was
Fighter Jets Aid American Plane at Ben Gurion Airport.
It was pretty obvious, even in the first article that they weren’t there to “aid” but as a defensive measure.
I believe that Israel has another layer of verbal ID codes that are required to approach the airspace.
Well yes and no to your question. The plane was on their radar so the transponder was working; otherwise they wouldn’t have known what it was, but no, you can’t transpond any data from an airplane’s transponder from the ground.
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