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Doomed Plane Was a System Failure
First of all, prayers to the families of the victims in that terrible business jet crash yesterday. It obviously wasn’t a terrorist attack…but it could have been a successful one.
All the news outlets are cheering the wonderful Air Force response and praising the changes we’ve made and all we have learned after 9/11. I see it as a dismal failure.
What if it wasn’t autopilot General Holt? You are supposed to be the expert in “What If.”
An Air Force fighter-jet response deserves “kudos” for its quick scramble to intercede when a Cessna plane violated airspace around Washington, D.C., retired Air Force Brigadier Gen. Blaine Holt said Monday.
Appearing on Newsmax‘s “Wake Up America,” Holt described the Sunday incident as eerily recalling the attacks in New York and Washington D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001.
“This thing got up to where it was supposed to go in New York — and then started to 180 degree turn,” Holt said. “That sounds like the autopilot was doing that. … It’s just going to go back to where it came from.”
We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and given up massive amounts of personal freedom for a higher level of security for the homeland. After yesterday it is very clear that we are hardly any safer than pre-9/11 but we are poorer and more inclusive.
There are two major circles around DC. The first is a no-fly zone requiring special permits and detailed flight plans filed. Ronald Reagan Airport is within this zone. Inside that zone, there is another. I will call it the kill zone, but I’m sure there is a colorful name for it. If a plane makes it to that inner zone, then you were able to bypass all security measures and failed your mission.
Once this plane made a U-turn over New York and made a B-line for DC, those F-16s on the tarmac, with engines running 24/7, should already have been preparing to intercept. If you heard the sonic boom over DC, they either punched it to catch up before DC and escorted them over the White House, or they punched it after they flew over and escorted them until it crashed. Either way is unacceptable and an utter failure.
Computers can track every flight in the air and assign a threat probability using trajectory, distance, altitude, unusual flight pattern, and flight plan deviations. It’s not that hard, guys. Am I the only one? Maybe, but this is my defense.
Published in General
Thanks for the correction. My bee keeper dad would have slapped me if he was still around. I think you got the point
He should have initiated a descent roughly 30 minutes out from Islip, likely a couple hundred miles up track, so maybe around Atlantic City.
Because we suspect that the A/P routed him back home, it may have carried out the two earlier turns as well, via programmed waypoints. For all we know, this flight was unpiloted since 15 minutes out of Tennessee.
Dan Gryder thinks this was an independent medical incapacitation unrelated to pressurization. He cites the fact that the intercept pilots described the Citation pilot as being “slumped over to the right.” Gryder doubts this would have been visible with loss of pressure because the cockpit and cabin windows should all have been iced over internally.
As he says, Gryder doesn’t usually do quick catch-and-release videos, but he wanted to strike back against some of the silly rumors, and even some serious ones.
I like Gryder a lot, but he’s more sure in this case than the evidence he presents should support. Maybe the cockpit windows were partly iced, but clear enough for a nosy F-16 pilot to peer through?
Also, Gryder thinks the resultant “return to base” leg was just caused by the aircraft holding heading after rounding the turn from SARDI-CCC to CCC-Islip at the best rate the plane could make. Heckuva coincidence if so, but he knows more about the autopilot than I do.
Maybe, but, wasn’t at least one of the passengers capable of using the radio?
Seems like autopsies will be able to determine if the passengers died from asphyxiation or from impact.
A rich girl, the nanny, and an infant. They may not have known anyting was amiss until it was hard to move around in there. The “IFR” spiral dive is a 1g illusion of level flight, but I suspect that this spiral dive was not so pleasant.
Their leading indicator that something was wrong may have been time, and if they slept, well…
Just an awful story.
Not surprised at all.
The Government sucks.