Posted on 11/13/2001 1:05:28 PM PST by X-Servative
They typically use ducks for the bird ingestion test, and the ducks are alive. A typical method used to disable the duck is to spray it with a CO2 fire extinguisher. That will "stun" the duck but will keep it alive until its ingestion. Dead birds don't seem to accurately simulate the action of live birds being ingested into an engine, and that's why live but stunned birds are used.
"On this board, all you need is a couple of dozen posters to say "In my mind it was a bomb.", and a few dozen more to answer "Damn right, and anyone that believes otherwise is an idiot.". "
I am told by someone who knows a lot about explosives that there is no such thing as an explosive that doesn't leave a residue-- so if that's it, they'll figure it out, and since Clinton isn't President anymore, they'll tell us!
Lady, you didn't get my point. I said the whole friggin' airline industry is on the ropes, capeesh? Not just one company...and the airline business is crucial for our economy. I did say they thought they were lying out of "good" motives, didn't I? Sheesh...
Don't bother with the attempts to unravel the NTSB from the President. You know as well as I do that it would take a coordinated conspiracy at ALL levels to pull off what you are suggesting.
What am I suggesting?? That the government may be motivated to lie to us about the incident? Yes, they may and yes, they might. Now, if you don't want to accept my explanation, don't.
Like some other replier said, over the course of time the truth will come out, so the stock market dosen't lose a thousand points and the airline industry goes flat broke.
IMO the ragheads got us again!
Please note any lies I have told. ROFL. You even a bigger idiot than one could imagine.
How many EMD SD-90MACS does it take to exert that much starting tractive effort?
You probably don't even know what the hell that means.
But I guarantee, that you will be the first one here, telling everyone exactly how the next train wreck happened, before the derailed cars even come to rest.
Not because you have an ounce of expertise whatsoever, but because your total distrust of anyone in a position of authority trumps that.
Look. Since the "rudder, tail whatever" (grin) was not physically with the bulk of the plane that splashed into a Rockaway neighborhood, you *bet* they are going to look hard at it. Right now, they are just gathering facts, and that parts of the plane fell off and landed in Jamaica Bay is an absolutely fascinating, important fact. It could provide evidence for or against many opf the theories being discussed here -- and no doubt, kicked around the hangar where the NTSB people and their helpers are looking at the forlorn bits of wreckage that are coming in.
Didn't the Alaskan airliner have some kind of similar problem.
Well, not according to some on Free Republic... but what happened to Alaska Air 261 is that an adjusting screw (not a little screw like in a window frame, a big screw that works like the one in a heavy-duty jack) that was borderline and maybe not lubricated right got stuck. When that happened, they couldn't adjust "the incidence of the horizontal stabilizer" (for the technically informed) or, for "the rest of us," how much the plane tended to nose up or nose down. They tried a lot of different things to get the plane back under control, including trying to fly it upside down... but they couldn't get control back. In their case the malfunction didn't happen until they were at or near cruise altitude, and then their superhuman efforts did keep the plane flying longer than most pilots probably could have done.
Similar crashes to that include the Southern Air Lockheed Hercules (a civilian C-130) that crashed on takeoff because a control lock was in place, Kelly AFB, October 4, 1986. (An A-300 does not have that type of control lock, but it illustrates how control malfunctions can doom a machine right after takeoff).
Another possibility I didn't mention on my list of cases that can be ruled out is a pitot/static system malfunction. Had that happened on a day like Monday, the crew could simply have used an external horizon reference (that means that if they had a problem with their flight instruments, the weather was nice enough they could just look out the windows and fly the plane by looking at the real horizon). There have been some nsty accidents from pitot/static systems, but all the recent air carrier ones have been at night (and usually in bad weather) and the planes have not broken up before hitting the ground or water -- so those prangs are not like this one.
Of course, every airline crash is kind of unique. Private pilots seldom make new mistakes (there are just new pilots fatally committing the same old mistakes) so we almost have to rely on the airline crashes to develop new safety concepts (ghoulish as that sounds, it's true. Regulations and operations manuals are written in the blood of innocents).
Keep asking questions.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Isn't there a lavatory in the rear of the plane -- the tail section?
Wouldn't there be ground service personnel on the plane before the flight stocking the meals, etc? Could they not have placed a bomb in the lavatory prior to departure? Note that it would be unlikely to be detected, as the lavatory would be unlikely to be used until the plane had reached cruise altitude.
Another variant on this theme notes that the flight originated in Boston, and JFK was a stop to take on more passengers. An important question could be: who, if anyone, got off? A more elaborate scenario would be bomb components hidden by ground personnel in Boston, a terrorist operative gets on in Boston, assembles the bomb in the lavatory, arms it, & hides it just before descent, and then deplanes in JFK.
There may well be fatal flaws with this line of inquiry -- how about it?
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