Posted on 11/16/2001 1:09:50 PM PST by smorgle
'I Know What I Saw...That Was No
Mechanical Problem...No Way!'
By Peter Gelzinis
BostonHerald.com
11-13-1
ROCKAWAY BEACH, NY -"I will never believe it was an accident.
They'll never convince me of that."
Eugene Sanfilippo kept looking past the microphones and
notebooks, down 131st Street toward Jamaica Bay and a vision
that the rest of us could not see.
It was past three in the afternoon, the sky above this sliver of
Queens was clear, but all this lanky, 45-year-old bus mechanic
could see was a huge orange ball of flame; he could still feel the
unbearable heat; he could hear people screaming; he could taste
the acrid black smoke.
And he was still afraid.
"When I heard the explosion, I thought we were under attack,"
Sanfilippo said.
"My first impression was that they'd hit us with a nuclear bomb. I
figured it was just like the World Trade Center. And I watched that
burn from the (Jamaica) bay."
Miles away from where Eugene Sanfilippo stood, at the edge of a
new Ground Zero, a mayor, a president's spokesman and a slew
of FAA officials were urging us to think "accident."
But they were not standing in Rockaway Beach.
They did not lose neighbors and friends across the bay in
Manhattan on Sept. 11. Black crepe still hangs here, along with
the memories of funerals for roughly 80 cops, firefighters and
stockbrokers.
To look into Eugene Sanfilippo's eyes was to see there were no
coincidences.
"Every day," he said, "I fear more and more for the safety of my
family. Why should we be made to suffer this way?"
Tommy Rayder, who works at JFK Airport, kept looking past the
fire barricades, toward a place where the autumn leaves had been
burnt off the trees.
The homes that were gone belonged to neighbors Tommy knew,
"because in this part of the city, we all know everybody."
"I want to believe it was mechanical. I'm hoping it was an accident.
These days," Tommy Rayder sighed, "an accident is what you
pray for.
"That's a weird thing to say isn't it? Here, a jet plane comes down
in the middle of a neighborhood, and you pray it's an accident
because you can't bear to think they'd do it again to us.
"Not here, not in Rockaway. You figure it couldn't happen again
cause we already suffered enough."
Standing a few feet away, James Gill tried as best he could to
comfort his wife who appeared to be deep in the throes of this new
suffering.
"We are up on the Cross Bay Bridge," James Gill said, "driving
over from Richmond Hill to look at a house.
"My wife saw the whole thing. What she saw was an explosion,
way forward on the engines, sort of just behind the cockpit.
"I had to pull over, just there on the bridge. Amanda was hysterical.
She dialed 911 on the cell phone, and just started to scream, `Help
me! Help me!' "
After being rocked by the sound of an initial explosion, James Gill
said he looked up to see American Flight 587 in flames and
attempting to bank, only to wind up in a flat death spiral.
"I was in munitions in both the Army and also the Navy. I know
what I heard and what I saw. That was no mechanical problem. No
way!"
Howard Greenberg rushed home from his law office in Manhattan
to find his wife shell-shocked.
After seeing the plane fall, and believing it was going to kill both
her and her children, Howard Greenberg said his wife spent the
next few horrific hours running over body parts in the direction of
her neighbors' burning homes. She was carrying blankets and
water.
"I'm afraid," Howard Greenberg said, "that my wife believes this is
another incident. She'd probably tell you that herself if she was
able to talk. I'm afraid that's impossible.
"Personally I might like to believe that it was something else, but
when you've been told that this whole area is being considered as
a crime scene, and that FBI agents are looking in your yard and on
your roof for evidence, for pieces of jet wreckage or human beings,
then it becomes hard to make a case for coincidence.
"Now that all may change, but right now this is simply too much to
fathom."
After being told to vacate her home, Lilly Reynolds looked into the
faces of the strangers swarmed around her.
"You know, after so many of our neighbors and friends died in
September we were just getting back to some idea of normal, then
this happens.
"My God, you say, they've done it again. What else are we
supposed to think?"
Why does every incident that takes place draw the attention of freaks? If you follow the logic of some people, there has never been an accident, ever! What are they suggesting this time? A UFO? A shootdown? Bigfoot?Actually from an industry that has been telling us for years that flying on an airplane is safer than taking a bath at home... and considering the events of 9/11... I would have to say that the people like you who are jumping to the conclusion that this was an accident are the FREAKS around here!
*GASP* Your reaction tells me I goofed. Sorry.
*GASP* Your reaction tells me I goofed. Sorry.
Sorry that I got so snippy.8-)
I don’t think the Feds, in this instance, are deliberately lying to us in some organized campaign. I just think that every government idiot is spouting off his speculation, and every journalist is spouting off his theory, and the conspiracy types (who are sometimes right, sometimes wrong) are chiming in with their ideas.
I don’t think anybody knows yet what happened, unless somebody intentionally caused this crash. If that’s the case, the saboteurs are the only ones who know the truth, and they’re keeping their mouths shut.
I think they're groping for a "mechanical failure" explanation, and fighting a "terrorist" explanation. It's the "path of least resistance" for them. I'm not hoping for a "terrorist scenario," just getting the feeling the government is trying to wish it away. I'll keep my mind open though, and I'll save my tinfoil for my sandwiches. :)
It was one of the first things I thought of. Reason: I used to have one of those space ship-shaped gyros back when I was a kid. It had a gymbal stand, and the poles at the top and bottom were made to use string with.
Once you got that thing cranked up to speed, you found out how much force it took to flip it over. It was really surprising.
Many people do not realize this force has a lot to do with operating a motorcyle, and changes steering forces, and fights with you when you 'lean over' the cycle. Then again most people don't realize that you intuitively steer in the opposite direction of a turn, at speed, when you are steering a motorcyle. This is part of how you counter the gyro forces and make the bike lean over the other way. At higher speeds, if you didn't steer in the opposite direction, I doubt you would be able to make the bike lean over at all. (funny, no one believes me on this, but it is true.)
Whether the abrupt change in direction was caused by the tail rudder coming off, or a thrust reverser activated on one engine, the engines themselves would resist a change in direction on their axis with a huge counterforce. This force is proportional to the mass of the spinning object (turbine rotors) and the speed (which is pretty darn fast on a jet engine at max power).
Old newsie here would say, if any piece you write or put on air, doesn't interest humans, you have problem from the get go!
("From the Get Go..... " Dan Ratherism #127)
Not much these days...
Much of FR has deteriorated into a pack of dogs who lick up whatever the press or government feeds them.
Pretty much CNN or Fox news in print...
But yeah, I'll believe an eyewitness with weapons experience over the press and the government still. So there's a few of us left..
-------
>>"This failure to deliver a verdict before bedtime is taken as further proof of negative government intervention." <<
I agree totally. This is silly, of course. We shouldn't expect a verdict that soon.
Equally trublesome to me, however, was the assertion I heard from almost all major media quarters and government spokesmen the instant after the crash occured.
I watched on TV while the plane was still crackling in flames, minutes after the crash, too hot even to touch with oven mitts. The mantra immediately began, "There is no evidence to suggest..."
They had not even found the flight data recorder or the voice recorder, and couldn't come within feet of the plane because of the intense heat. Of COURSE there is no evidence! Nor is there evidence to support that this was *not* a terrorist attack.why not say, rather, “The cause of this is not known at this time”? This insults my intelligence.
Maybe this was done to "avoid a national panic." If that is the case, it is quite brotherly of them to decide what information we "can and can't handle." However, I am not three years old.
Not advancing any crackpot theories here, but my rationale forces me to make a not-so-giant-leap in logic to believe there is a high likelihood that this was a terrorist action, given the circumstances we find ourselves in.
It would seem that the press finds the most idiotic people to interview. But perhaps before the sky started crashing down on their heads they were more rational beings.
Thank you. There may well have been a bomb in the cargo hold. But that might have also been an explosion due to a mechanical problem with the engine, combined with all the other stuff we're talking about.
I'm sorry, but it is incredibly difficult for even a person trained in accident investigation to instantaneously dissect and analyze a crash realtime while it's happening in front of them. It happens quickly, a lot happens at once, it's emotionally traumatic, and what APPEARS to be one thing often turns out to be another.
I'm not ruling out a bomb, or some other terror act, not at all. But eyewitnesses to crimes and aircraft accidents (and we may have both at the same time, here) are not at the top of the list of reliable account. This summer at Oshkosh, a friend of mine died in an approach to landing accident in an experimental plane. One of the officers of the company that made that plane witnessed it. He knew what to look for, knew the plane inside and out, and still was not able to 100% process what was basically a stall-spin accident.
I feel badly for this guy, and I'm sure that's he's able to provide the investigators with some valuable information, but it is beyond the realm of possibility that he could diagnose the cause of the accident in that manner.
On the other end of the witness spectrum, I truly believe that whoever (MIS-)handled the TWA 800 went exactly the other way with all the witnesses who saw a missile. And there are other very credible people close to the situation who believe very strongly that it was an attack. But to write off more than 100 witnesses by saying they were drunk, for instance, is wa-a-a-a-y beyond the pale, and into the criminal spectrum.
Force is actually related to mass and acceleration. In a rotating object, acceleration is related to tangential "speed" and distance from the CG. A non-point object will have some average of the distance, speed, and mass distribuiton -- hence an average force.
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