Posted on 01/08/2009 8:18:40 PM PST by Sioux-san
Last week, I received an email from a former 747 pilot named Thomas Young.
In early August 1996, Young explained, he was laid up in a Hong Kong hospital with a back injury. His employer, Polar Air Cargo, flew his wife Barbara out to join him. They had little else to do but watch TV. Here is what they saw.
The videotape began with people milling about on a deck facing a body of water. In the background, a streak of†light can be seen leaving a point below the edge of the deck, accelerating as it climbed; it passed behind what appeared to me to be a thin cloud layer and continued upward out of the frame, from right to left. As the streak of light disappeared beyond the edge of the frame, after a slight pause, there is a generalized, dim flash on the upper left side of the screen, followed by a brighter and more pronounced flash.
Some 270 eyewitnesses on Long Island would give formal accounts to the FBI of the same event--an apparent missile attack on TWA Flight 800 on the night of July 17,1996. Scores of them would provide detailed drawings.
“The TWA 800 story was big news,” Young explains, “and was getting top billing in the Asian press.”
Young had a distinct perspective on what he was seeing. For six years in the 1980s he had worked at Boeing, much of that time in its Space and Strategic Missile Systems Division.... Given the TV reception in his Hong Kong hospital, Young could not identify the type of missile that took out TWA Flight 800, but he was confident he was seeing a missile.
“If this was a Navy missile,” Barbara recalls her husband telling her at the time, “there goes Clinton’s re-election.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cashill.com ...
Lauda Air Flight 004 on May 26, 1991. According to the black box and the flight recorder the flight crew did nothing. They just deployed.
The 1989 incident-don’t recall it, but I don’t see how an “electrical short” can cause deployment of a door. There are interlocks built in those systems to prevent such a thing-not to mention mechanical locks. I’d have to know more about the specific incident before I could discuss it.
United Airlines Flight 811, occured on February 24, 1989. Final cause was identified as improper wiring and deficiencies in the door design.
I said in my original post that what the official line is improbable—but when you couple it with the non-technical big picture, lots of different big and small facts, plus eyewitness reports—hell, wasn’t July 19th Baathist Independence Day?—it seems kind of fishy.
Why is that fishy and none of the other ones?
As I said before-I don’t know all the details of every aircraft mishap in history. I don’t have a lot of time at the moment but I did look up the NTSB report about the United flight in 1989
http://amelia.db.erau.edu/reports/ntsb/aar/AAR92-02.pdf
Here’s an excerpt:
2.6.3 Possibility of Electrical Malfunction
“Due to the lack of physical evidence, the Safety Board was unable to
conclude that an electrical short caused the cargo door actuator to move the latch
cams to the nearly open position, allowing the door to separate when the cabin
pressure exceeded the load-carrying capability of the door latches. Neither could
this possibility be eliminated. A momentary actuation of the door open switch by
someone on the ground in the presence of a faulty S2 switch could also have
caused the latches to open through the closed lock sectors. However, no evidence
has been found that someone actuated the switch after the door was initially closed
and locked.
The Safety Board concludes that it was not possible for the cargo door
to have opened electrically at the time of the loss of the door. There was no power
to the ground handling bus to power the actuator, even if there had been an
electrical short. Further, the Safety Board concludes that it is highly improbable
that an electrical short could have caused the latches to open after the airplane was
airborne. Although the ground handling bus could conceivably have been
powered, failures of other components that were tested as functional would also
have been necessary.
The Safety Board believes that the electrical operation of the latch
actuators from the fully closed and locked position most likely occurred before the
engines were started when the ground handling bus was powered. The precise
source of the electrical actuation could not be determined. Once the engines were
started, the possibility of an electrical short decreases significantly because the
ground handling bus is disengaged from the APU when the engines start. There
was no evidence that the flightcrew reengaged the ground handling bus.
Because the preaccident condition of the S2 master latch lock switch
could not be determined, it could also not be determined whether its proper
functioning would have prevented the accident. The Safety Board did not
determine whether damaged cargo door wires or a malfunctioning S2 switch could
have been found by UAL maintenance had they been more aggressive in troubleshooting
the cargo door problem in the weeks prior to the accident”
In other words-they don’t know.
If the aircraft that went down in 1996-Flight 800-had had existing issues, etc-it appears both the Lauda Air and united Flights you reference both did have prior issues with the affected systems, then I might be more inclined to go with the party line on Flight 800-it just seems unlikely, and, as I said, there isn’t any conflicting info on those other flights to indicate foul play, but 800 has a lot of questions/gray areas.
My feeble attempts to console them were obviously ineffective, especially considering my youth and struggles to handle my own grief. I can only imagine what you went through.
That the media would never bring up such an obvious point simply proves what we've believed about them for 30 years.
Perhaps that is because there's no way to blame that one on the US military and so is much less exciting.
...than...ValuJet flight#592 or Northwest Airlines flight#255.
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