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Sinai Crash Caused by “External Influences”
The Russian airline Kogalymavia has blamed “external influences” for Saturday’s Sinai plane crash which killed 224 people, reports the BBC:
A senior airline official said: “The only reasonable explanation is that it was [due to] external influence.” …
At a news conference in Moscow, the deputy director of the airline, which was later renamed Metrojet, ruled out a technical fault and pilot error.
“The only [explanation] for the plane to have been destroyed in mid-air can be specific impact, purely mechanical, physical influence on the aircraft,” Alexander Smirnov said.
“There is no such combination of failures of systems which could have led to the plane disintegrating in the air,” he added.
Beats me what that means. Beats me what it implies. Your best guess?
Published in Foreign Policy
ct,
The black box would give us a milli-second by milli-second account of what systems went down and when. A bomb or a missile would have a very characteristic simultaneous signature. I am assuming that this is what the Kogalymavia people were talking about. We don’t have the FAA in possession of the black box so I am taking their word for it.
No matter how badly the plane was serviced it wouldn’t fail in such a manner that the black box recording would look like a bomb or missile. However, the evidence is in the hands of the Russians.
Regards,
Jim
Is there a way for the source to provide proof without revealing themselves – sent where the receivers could do their own verification as part of the investigation? I’m thinking there are more investigations going on than just one?
The clean break in the upper half is quite similar to Aloha 243, just at the rear rather than at the front.
It’s hard to rule out bad Russian “consumer” (non-military) goods. Would anyone voluntarily take a Russian plane instead of a company flying Boeing or Airbus?
It was an Airbus
Claire & all,
I want to make my position even clearer. If the tail section broke off because a previous accident had left stress fractures in the fuselage then the plane would immediately become unflyable and go down. However, if a black box recorder was on board it would not lose function nor would many of the plane’s systems lose function. This would be clearly recorded and would suggest that the possibility of the stress fracture failure was still in play. On the other hand, if the black box showed a near-instantaneous loss of all systems then there really is no other probable explanation other than on board explosion or external attack.
A cigar is sometimes just a cigar.
Regards,
Jim
A fuel line failure seems improbable. The clean break at the base of the vertical stabilizer and the clean break at the upper part of the tail section look like seam failures, and then tearing as the ripping slowed down.
No idea what would have caused the seam failures, though, if that’s what they were.
Eric Hines
It depends on the bomb.
Big bomb ripping tail off might terminate all data in hundredths of seconds.
Fatigue plus air pressure might do the same in tenths.
Small bomb initiating a crack might look more like fatigue…
As Pan Am 103 and MH-17 taught us, bombs and missiles leave fairly characteristic damage that should be easy to observe from collected wreckage.
John,
GC, HPLC,…
…hmmmm….reminds me of the Cuyahoga County Coroners Office Lab for some reason.
Regards,
Jim
Regards,
Jim
For several years now I’ve wanted to fly Aeroflot, but maybe only once. I understand the majority of people who do it live to tell about it.
I also want to fly Ryanair, which my daughter refuses to do even though it seems to have a fine safety record.
Ryanair is very straightforward. Greyhound with more efficiency.
You also only die once.
I’ll fly Aeroflot if I get the left seat, and Vladimir Putin is in the right seat.
Eric Hines
Yeah, fracture at the top from unknown cause (fatigue fracture, bomb in passenger area, etc.) and aerodynamic stress then ripped the tail off, mangling the lower area. You might get a bit of data into the black box before the power and data cabling tore apart. You’d have to model out whether the remainder of the plane would stay in one piece for a while, but it’d be uncontrollable regardless.
Sudden catastrophic failure could leave you with very little data. There’s no knowing for sure until the boxes have been read. A fire or small explosion in the cargo hold could have taken a while to bring the plane down.
Not necessarily. A lot of aircraft accidents are due to piling on of small and large failures, whether pilot or mechanical.
Absolutely. Aircraft are too well designed for “one thing” to bring them down. Without direct pilot error, any crash is the result of a string of cascading and/or latent failures, each of which are highly improbable even by themselves.
Something called AWD News reports
AWD (Another Western Dawn) is reported to be a Dubai based conspiracy news site with a record of publishing bogus stories. (Pamela Geller is pushing AWD’s story right now.)
The story isn’t found on searching the WAM website for <Erdogan> or (flight number)<9268>, though it would be good if someone could search the Arabic side too. Did the story vanish down the memory hole? Is it disinformation? Or, more probably, it’s just another bogus story.
Self Redacted pithy comment because the source material was bogus….dang it.
It’s bogus. Widely reported is that Erdoğan sent a perfectly normal telegram of condolence to Putin, loosely translated, “My dear friend, I have learned with deep sorrow of the accident in the Sinai Peninsula and the large number of Russian citizens who tragically lost their lives. My family and I send condolences and patience to the relatives of those who lost their lives in this accident.” (Wishing “patience” to the bereaved is a standard Turkish locution.)
The rapidity with which these bogus stories circulate makes me wonder if civilian journalism was as great idea as we hoped.
Oh, right. Because professional journalism has such a super track record.
I recall reading, on microfiche, the fawning New York Times stories about Fidel Castro rise to power in Cuba.
The question isn’t whether it had a perfect track record (it did not), but whether it had a better one. And that would be a hard question to answer — how would one measure it, exactly? How could we measure how well the new journalism is doing when we don’t have the benefit of historical hindsight?
Today is better because people are more aware than ever before that just because it is in writing does not make it true.
Perhaps, but we’d have to find a meaningful way to measure that and a meaningful way to test the proposition across a number of relevantly similar circumstances. You’re arguing that the news consumer has become more savvy and skeptical: How would we measure that? And can we show that this skepticism results in the wider population knowing a higher ratio of true to false things? Or is it possible that it results in the wider population becoming more susceptible to propaganda, conspiracy theories, a paranoia?
Claire,
I certainly agree that there are problems with news propagation. First, this may be a good thing as amateurs are learning the hard way what the pros always knew. Wait until you are sure so check sources, check sources, and check sources.
Second, I’d ask you to comment on how it was that the most august anchorman, Dan Rather, of the most august MSM news source, CBS, could have continued to maintain a story that was based on a patently false source years after it was clearly known. Next, one of the most august filmmakers of Hollywood, Robert Redford, makes a huge budget first run movie continuing the false story line.
The Net may have teething problems, but I feel a lot safer than I did when all I had was “…and that’s the way it is…” delivered by the Gds of CBS.
Regards,
Jim
Climate Change is propagated by professionals, and debunked by the amateurs. The amateurs have it right.
Yeah, Walter Cronkite declared the Vietnam War lost after the Tet Offensive -the NVA and Vietcong had just suffered a disastrous defeat. Professional journalists are the PR agents of Leftists and progressives everywhere.
With a story like this one early in its spread, you can watch how it spreads by looking for links and key text strings. We can also watch Wikipedia edits. Or how many feature films it shows up in years after being debunked.
I suspect that there are examples of Soviet disinformation that are still in the history books as fact.
Wide distribution of propaganda certainly created the impression that Joseph McCarthy made up the Communist danger out of whole cloth.
Then there are the uncovered stories, such as how much damage the money spent funding the antiwar movement did and where it came from. We have a small example in the radical history of Stanley Dunham and her parents. There are many other such stories.
More susceptible? I didn’t know such a thing was possible.
But then there are those famous last words: “It can’t get any worse.”
Totally. We lost that war because of our media – no other reason.
Claire,
UPDATE:
“It may have been an explosive device.” – from Prime Minister David Cameron’s Office
Russian plane crash: British say bomb may have downed flight
Regards,
Jim