Question, which of these 4 don’t belong:
- HIV.
- Herpes.
- Gonorrhea.
- A condo in Surfside, Florida.
Answer: Number 3, Gonorrhea, because you can get rid of Gonorrhea.
Category: Disaster
No Blogging Tonight
As a result of our water eater giving up the ghost a few days back, we spent this evening separating the wheat from the chaff in the basement.
The wheat will be picked up by movers and move to storage tomorrow, and the traffic will be trashed out by the clean up crew the day after.
When you do things like this you think about deep philosophical questions like, “Who in their right mind puts carpeting down in a basement?”, which is what the previous owners did.
I finished the evening sore and stinky, and so had a long hot shower.
Since Sharon joined me, the evening was not a complete loss.
Jeebus
Portland, Oregon hit 114°F (45.5°C) Today.
If the death toll in the Pacific Northwest from high temperatures over this weekend is not in the thousands, I would be very surprised.
Even for houses with air-conditioning, this is likely to be more heat than they could handle:
Portland again reached a new record temperature late Sunday afternoon, hitting 112 degrees and breaking the previous records set earlier Sunday and Saturday, the National Weather Service announced on Twitter.
The high temperature for Portland International Airport reached 108 degrees Saturday, surpassing the city’s all-time record of 107, first set in 1965. By 2:20 p.m. Sunday afternoon, Portland had surpassed that record by three degrees. The record now stands at 112 as of 5 p.m. Sunday.
Portland normally has a handful of 90°F+ days a year.
In the 4 years that I lived in Portland, it never broke 100°F. (Update, Checked the record, I was wrong. From August 1976 through August 1980, there were 10 100°F+ days)
Obviously, this is weather, and not climate, but it is clearly anthropogenic climate change driven weather.
The 3rd World Welcomes Florida
If you are thinking that sh%$ like buildings falling down for no reason is a symptom of 3rd world dysfunction, then the the collapse of a condominium tower in Surfside, Florida is a pretty good indication that something is very wrong in Florida, though my guess is that this is not isolated to the sunshine state:
After the dust had settled and the fog of incredulity had lifted, Soriya Cohen had only prayer and hope and questions — lots of questions — about the abrupt and violent collapse of a 12-story oceanfront condominium tower in Surfside early Thursday morning.
First and foremost in Cohen’s mind was the whereabouts of her husband, Brad Cohen, whom she had not seen or heard from since part of the Champlain Towers South Condo came crashing down, wiping away 55 units in mere seconds.
Brad Cohen was inside one of those units on the 11th floor along with his brother, Gary Cohen, said Soriya Cohen, when the building collapsed at 1:23 a.m., the time that Miami-Dade Fire Rescue first responded to a call for help at the condominium tower. Soriya Cohen had spent the night with their daughter at a different building in neighboring Miami Beach.
………
It will likely be months or even years before engineers and other experts know exactly why a part of the Champlain Towers South came crashing down.
Before those answers are found, search and rescue crews will continue the painstaking work of picking through a mountain of rubble, looking for even the faintest signs of life that might be buried inside the two-story-high pile of debris.
More than 20 hours after the partial collapse, the death toll remained unknown. Officials confirmed at least one death, and said 35 survivors were pulled from the wreckage, with 10 injured persons treated at the scene and at least two transported to a hospital.
Miami-Dade County police said as many as 99 people are reported missing. There were 102 people from the building who had been accounted for. The part of the tower that collapsed held 55 units. The remainder of the 136-unit tower remained standing, though residents have been evacuated.
………
Security camera footage of the collapse looked eerily similar to a controlled demolition, minus the flash of explosives. One side of the tower buckled first before more of the structure collapsed into a pile of rubble. The cause of the collapse is unknown, though one building expert deemed it “an oddity of biblical proportions” for the 40-year-old structure to fall unexpectedly.
Climate change driven rising water tables, typically Floridian lax building codes and enforcement, and general poor maintenance are the likely causes.
Still this is profoundly 3rd world sh%$.
The Solution Is
It appears that the wild swings in heavily shorted stocks, most recently for AMC movie theaters, is causing instabilities in the market that threaten the stability of index funds.
The solution to this is fairly straightforward, first and most importantly, enact a transaction tax for all financial transfers to increase the friction, and hence reduce the speculation.
It might also be a good idea to ban Payment for Flow Order, which is a Bernie Madoff inspired “Innovation” which is little more than an excuse for front running, where a broker executes their trades before those of their customers for their own personal profit.
Speculation is a cost we pay for investment, an evil that we tolerate in order to encourage investment.
A tax of between 10 and 50 basis points (⅒% — ½%) tax per transaction.
Even if it does not generate as much revenue as its supporters predict, it will produce a very real public good:
Index funds are supposed to cut out the human-driven craziness that periodically infects markets, but the recent meme-stock fever proved the $11 trillion industry is far from immune.
The remarkable surge in shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and a handful of other stocks is showing up in multiple exchange-traded funds, skewing portfolios, altering risk profiles and exerting outsized influence on prices.
Take the $68 billion iShares Russell 2000 ETF (ticker IWM). In the past week through Thursday, AMC powered 70% of the product’s advance. The stock was responsible for less than a 10th of the fund’s return in the previous week.
It’s a timely reminder that even diversified funds on autopilot remain subject to the whims and eccentricities that frequently lash markets out of nowhere.
………
“For index investing, the appeal is that human decision-making, human emotions are taken out of it,” said Tom Essaye, a former Merrill Lynch trader who founded “the Sevens Report” newsletter. “That works all well and good until a stock that is supposed to be 50 basis points of the fund now becomes 6%.”
This is going to destroy us all.
If I Were to Say, “Toxic Radioactive Flood,” What State Would You Assume?
If you said Florida, we have a winner.
A waste pond once operated by Borden Chemical is now leaking and threatening a massive flood of toxic radioactive waste into Tampa Bay.
This has to be the most Florida thing ever:
The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, declared a state of emergency on Saturday after a significant leak at a large pond at the old Piney Point phosphate mine threatened to burst a system that stores water polluted with radioactive materials.
Officials ordered more than 300 homes evacuated and closed off a highway near the large reservoir in the Tampa Bay area north of Bradenton.
………
The state department of environmental protection said a break was detected on Friday in one wall of a 77-acre pond that has a depth of 25ft and holds millions of gallons of water containing phosphorus and nitrogen from the old phosphate plant.
Officials brought in rocks and materials to plug the hole but were unsuccessful.
………
Workers were pumping out thousands of gallons per minute to bring the volume down. Pumping the entire pond would take 10 to 12 days. Others were working to chart a path for controlling how the water can flow from the pond into the Tampa Bay.
………
The pond at the old Piney Point phosphate mine sits in a stack of phosphogypsum, a waste product from manufacturing fertilizer that is radioactive. It contains small amounts of naturally occurring radium and uranium. The stacks can also release large concentrations of radon gas.
Obviously, DeSantis is not to blame, this time.
This is more a consequence of “Same old, same old,” corruption that has characterized Florida politics since at least the days of Carl G. Fisher.
Why people want to live there, or move there, is completely beyond my understanding.
The Front Fell Off
The Front Fell Off?
It now appears that the Ever Given, the massive container ship which had completely blocked the Suez Canal, has been freed and traffic has resumed through the waterway.
There is still a major backlog of ships in both directions, but after a week, we should expect a return to normal shipping conditions.
The bigger issue is how this event has demonstrated the fragility of international shipping.
What’s more, it has increasingly been juxtaposed with economic fragility driven by the increasingly oligopolistic nature of shipping, which means that if one shipper fails, the entire system can seize up.
The classic Clarke and Dawe sketch, “The Front Fell Off,” (shown) is a perfect metaphor for this:
In this newsletter, I do a lot of explaining about complicated problems caused by big dumb corporate institutions. I don’t have to do that this time, because the story of the mess in the Suez is so simple. “After years of bitcoin and reddit short selling and credit default swaps and a million other things I don’t understand,” one random person put in a tweet that went viral, “it’s so refreshing to hear that global commerce is in peril because a big boat got stuck in a canal.”
That’s basically the story right there, it’s a big boat and it got stuck in a canal. The ship blocking the Suez, called the Ever Given, weights 220,000 tons, and is as long as the Empire State Building is high. Despite the hilarious nature of the problem, the disruption to world trade is large and serious, costing tens of billions of dollars. And if the ship can’t be dislodged soon, some consumers will once again experience shortages of basic staples like toilet paper.
That said, the reason this disruption to global commerce seems so dumb is because it is. It starts with the ship size itself. Over the last few decades, ships have gotten really really big, four times the size of what they were 25 years ago, what the FT calls “too big to sail.’ The argument behind making such massive boats was efficiency, since you can carry more at a lower cost. The downside of such mega-ships should have been obvious. Ships like this, which are in effect floating islands, are really hard to steer in tight spaces like ports and canals, and if they get stuck, they are difficult to unstick. In other words, the super smart wizard financiers who run global trade made ships that don’t fit in the canals they need to fit into.
The rise of mega-ships is paralleled by the consolidation of the shipping industry itself. In 2000, the ten biggest shipping companies had a 12% market share, by 2019 that share had increased to 82%. This understates the consolidation, because there are alliances among these shippers. The stuck ship is being run by the Taiwanese shipping conglomerate Evergreen, which bought Italian shipping firm Italia Marittima in 1998 and London-based Hatsu in 2002, and is itself part of the OCEAN alliance, which has more than a third of global shipping.
Making ships massive, and combining such massive ships into massive shipping monopolies, is a bad way to run global commerce. We’ve already seen significant problems from big shipping lines helping to transmit financial shocks into trade shocks, such as when Korean shipper Hanjin went under and stranded $14 billion of cargo on the ocean while in bankruptcy. It’s also much harder for small producers and retailers to get shipping space, because large shippers want to deal with large clients. And fewer ports can handle these mega-ships, so such ships induce geographical inequality. Increasingly, we’re not moving ships between cities, we’re moving cities to where the small number of giant shipping lines find it efficient to ship.
Dumb big ships owned by monopolies are the result of dumb big ideas, the physical manifestation of what Thomas Friedman was pushing in the 1990s and 2000s with books such as The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, the idea that “taking fat out of the system at every joint” was leading towards a more prosperous, peaceful and competitive world. Friedman’s was a finance-friendly perspective, a belief that making us all interdependent with a very thin margin of error would force global cooperation.
………
What is new isn’t the vulnerability of the Suez Canal as a chokepoint, it’s that we’ve intentionally created lots of other artificial chokepoints. And since our production systems have little fat, these systems are tightly coupled, meaning a shortage in one area cascades throughout the global economy, costing us time, money, and lives.
It’s a dumb way to organize a global supply chain system, just as it was dumb to build ships that are too big to fit into canals. And that’s why the “big boat stuck in canal” is such a great illustration of the problem, it shows our policymakers and corporate leaders couldn’t even think through what would happen if Really Big Thing Got Stuck In Important Canal.
………
The answer to addressing the problem of thinned out supply chains is to recognize that hyper-efficient globalization inherently carries the downside of unpredictable shortages, geopolitical tension, and supply disruptions. And then redesign our global trading order to make it less efficient and more resilient. There are three basic changes we’ll need.
Matt Stoller calls for a rigorous enforcement of anti-monopoly measures, a reimpositition of border friction like tariffs, and a restructuring of business so that they are less indebted and less vulnerable.
Unfortunately, this will not happen, because this system was created to benefit financial institutions and to drive wages down through labor arbitrage, so his reforms are actually a repudiation of the entire system.
I support his ideas, but I don’t think that they are politically realistic at this time.
Immigrant Tries Too Hard to Be a Real American
There has been another senseless mass shooting in Colorado, this one in Boulder.
10 dead, including a cop, though the shooter was arrested.
For once, it was not a classically white guy, it was allegedly a Syrian refugee, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa.
It’s a rather grisly return to normalcy, 2 mass shootings in less than 2 weeks.
God Bless America.
Also, before I forget, “Thoughts and prayers.”
Your Eyes Will Bleed, and So Will Your Ears
Wait for it, it takes about 30 seconds
Well, Robert Goulet must be spinning in his grave, because he has lost his crown for the, “Worst Rendition of an ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’ inspired song ever.”
By the teeth of the flying spaghetti monster, this is bad.
It makes Rosanne Barr’s version sound positively operatic.
On the other hand, it is a PERFECT metaphor for the incredible clusterf%$# that CPAC was this year.
The Term Here is Eating Our Seed Corn
It appears that Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been decimating bees across the nation, is not just an issue with a specific type of insecticide, but a more general consequence of chemical intensive farming:
As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.
Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.
This is going to get ugly, and I expect to see a collapse of some bee pollinated crops, most likely almonds, before we actually start applying some common sense regulation to the industry.
The Bright Side of a Nuclear Meltdown
Much like Chernobyl and the DMZ in Korea, it turns out that the Fukushima exclusion zone has become one f%$# of nature preserve:
A stunning new photo project offers unprecedented insight into the wild and desolate exclusion zone surrounding the Fukushima nuclear power plant – where tonnes of contaminated soil lie untouched and overgrown forest is engulfing hundreds of abandoned vehicles and homes.
The 12.5-mile exclusion zone around the nuclear plant now resembles post-apocalyptic scenes from The Walking Dead after it was instantly abandoned following the 2011 nuclear disaster.
People deserted the area after warnings of dangerous levels of radioactivity, leaving cars, classrooms and libraries to be swallowed by the overgrown wilderness in stark scenes reminiscent of those seen in the show, in which entire towns have been left in stasis after zombies overran the earth.
The photographer sees a stunning tableau of the forest swallowing the works of man.
I am more excited about the possibility for flora and fauna that have not been seen in Japan in centuries to return to this region.
The Very Modern Model Of a Modern Moron Pundit Class
Donna Brazile, last seen mismanaging Al Gore’s Presidential campaign in 2000, is now praising George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
Seriously?
Un-dirtyword-believable.
So, It Appears That It Wasn’t Aliens
We now have confirmation that the debris from the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370:
A piece of debris found washed ashore on a beach in the Indian Ocean came from missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, the Malaysian prime minister has announced, confirming the first trace of the plane since it vanished last year with 239 people on board.
“Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts has conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris … is indeed MH370,” Najib Razak said on Wednesday.
Razak said he hoped the positive identification of the two-metre fragment, which was found last week on the French island of Réunion, would “lift the fog of uncertainty” for grieving relatives.
This is not a surprise.
The conspiracy theories were bullsh%$.
Yeah, I am So Confident in the Safety of the Keystone XL Pipeline
Up in Alberta, land of the Tar Sands, a brand new bitumen pipeline has just ruptured, causing a major oil spill:
One of the largest leaks in Alberta history has spilled about five million litres of emulsion from a Nexen Energy pipeline at the company’s Long Lake oilsands facility south of Fort McMurray.
The leak was discovered Wednesday afternoon.
Nexen said in a statement its emergency response plan has been activated and personnel were onsite. The leak has been stabilized, the company said.
The spill covered an area of about 16,000 square metres, mostly within the pipeline corridor, the company said. Emulsion is a mixture of bitumen, water and sand.
BTW, that high tech brand new (1 year in operation) pipeline?
The warning system failed as well:
Nexen’s “failsafe” system didn’t detect massive pipeline spill: http://t.co/ULEnxlmQEN pic.twitter.com/DmChECTUX7
— Anna Mehler Paperny (@amp6) July 17, 2015
This is what happens when the private industries capture the government that is supposed to regulate it.
Yet Another Reason to Not Give to the Red Cross
In addition to killing off most of the hemophiliacs in the United States because of their unwillingness to test blood for HIV and discard HIV tainted clotting factor, of course.
It turns out that the America Red Cross raised $½ Billion for post earthquake aid to Haiti, and built just 6 homes:
The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.
In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.
Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.
The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.
The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.
The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.
After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.
Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. [They f%$#ed up Katrina and 911 too, and my father’s recollections of their help during the Anchorage earthquake in 1964 is similar. He remembers the Salvation Army outperforming them by all metrics] Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.
One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.
In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”
The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.
Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.
The American Red Cross has a long history of over promising, excessive fund raising, and under delivering.
This is not a well run organization in my lifetime.
If you want to give blood, find a local non profit blood bank.
If you want to donate money to the victims of a disaster, find a bit less ponderous and self-aggrandizing organization.
*http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-29/news/mn-63591_1_blood-banks
Bad Day at the Office
Click for slideshow
Yes, I think that this is a class 1 mishap
I think that this is the wing
Because of some as yet undetermined braking issue, a Hungarian Gipen overran the runway at the Lion Effort 2015 military exercise: (Google Translate, original here)
Air base in Caslav Gripen crashed Hungarian army. He slid off the runway and ended up in a field. The pilot ejected. Both are fine. The army said that the aircraft not brake, but it is not clear whether it was pilot error or a technical fault to blame. Damaged aircraft is probably damaged beyond repair.
“At this moment I can say that the aircraft slid off the runway. Pilots are in accordance with the provisions ejected. If the machine is uncontrollable and threatens serious accident, they must leave the plane. Both, however, are in order and nothing dramatic happened in the outcome, “said iDNES.cz Defense Ministry spokesman Petr Medek.
Airport spokesman Tomas Maruscak on Czech Television said that the aircraft not brake. “At the moment it is not possible to say whether it is to blame pilot error or a technical failure,” he said. According to him, the aircraft ended up in a field.
The airplane rolled out of the runway at approximately 13:40. Until the sixteenth hour airport was closed because of an accident and other flights are diverted to the airport in Pardubice. “Aircraft accidents being examined by the Commission of the Department of Military Aviation Section of Supervision and Control of the Ministry of Defense,” said Magdalena Dvorakova of the Communication Department of the General Staff.
The fact that both men escaped without injury, it is not obvious. Ejection from an aircraft that is on the runway, is a very difficult matter. “Ejection at zero altitude for pilots is a big adrenaline rush when I say it in quotation marks,” he told ČTK former military pilot Jan Vachek. According to him, it can only seat state of the art, which are equipped with Gripen fighters.
According to another expert, who asked not to be named, the Gripen crashed beyond repair. Damage could increase antenna systems located at the end of the runway, which is likely to aircraft at high speed when landing entered.
In Caslav held an international exercise Lion Effort 2015, air exercise States whose armies have any versions of the JAS-39 Gripen. Outside the Czech participates just Hungary, and Sweden. The Kingdom of Thailand participating without their aircraft.
Martin Baker ejection seats save another two unlucky aircrew.
Amtrak Train Crash Just Got Weird
It appears that a short time before the Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia, two other trains on the same track were hit with ……… Something:
Just before Tuesday’s deadly Amtrak derailment, both a SEPTA commuter train and another Amtrak train in the same corridor were hit by projectiles, one which crashed through the engineer’s window.
An Amtrak spokesman could not be reached regarding Amtrak Acela Train 2173, which passengers said was struck at about 9:05 p.m. A SEPTA train was struck by a projectile at about 9:10 p.m., according to a SEPTA spokeswoman, who said there is no indication the incident is connected to the derailment, which happened at about 9:30 p.m.
………
SEPTA northbound Train 769, en route to Trenton on tracks on the Northeast Corridor beside the Amtrak rails, was approximately four miles from the derailment site when it was struck at about 9:10 p.m. SEPTA spokeswoman Jerri Williams said an “unknown projectile” broke the engineer’s window.
No injuries were reported and the train was held on the tracks ahead of the North Philadelphia station. The 80 passengers were transferred to buses.
Amtrak’s northbound Train 188 derailed on the Northeast Corridor tracks, killing at least seven and injuring scores. The cause of the derailment is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Railroad Administration.
I’m wondering if some kids having “fun” with cinder blocks on an over pass, or some nut with a firearm, was playing a really stupid game that night.
The Germanwings Crash Begins to be a Bit Less Mysterious
They have not yet found the flight data recorder, but they have released the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), and it appears that one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit:
As officials struggled Wednesday to explain why a jet with 150 people on board crashed amid a relatively clear sky, an investigator said evidence from a cockpit voice recorder indicated one pilot left the cockpit before the plane’s descent and was unable to get back in.
A senior military official involved in the investigation described “very smooth, very cool” conversation between the pilots during the early part of the flight from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, Germany. Then the audio indicated that one of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter.
“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door, and there is no answer,” the investigator said. “And then he hits the door stronger, and no answer. There is never an answer.”
He said, “You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”
While the audio seemed to give some insight into the circumstances leading to the Germanwings crash on Tuesday morning, it also left many questions unanswered.
It’s now beginning to sound like deliberate action by one of the pilots, though it’s curious that the descent was not steeper.
Really Bad Day at the Office
Line width is altitude, circles represent speed
Little pieces indicate high speed impact
Germanwings Flight 9525 flying from Barcelona to Düsseldorf has crashed in the Alps, there appear to be no survivors. The flight profile is kind of weird:
A passenger jet carrying 150 people crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday. Officials expect no survivors.
Germanwings Flight 9525 left Barcelona at 10:01 a.m. CET for Dusseldorf and went down about 430 miles south-southeast of Paris. The plane, a 24-year-old Airbus A320, was operated by the Lufthansa-owned budget carrier.Images from the crash site show small pieces of the plane scattered throughout the mountainside, suggesting a violent impact — and significantly decreasing the likelihood of any survivors.
“Appalling images in this mountain landscape,” said Christopher Castaner, deputy mayor of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, near where the plane crashed. “There is nothing left but debris and bodies.”
Germanwings officials initially said Flight 9295 sent a distress signal about an hour after takeoff before crashing into a mountainous zone at an altitude of about 6,550 feet.
The descent from 38,000 feet lasted nearly eight minutes.
However, France’s aviation authority reported that the plane never sent a signal, and officials lost radio contact with the flight. The plane went down in mid-flight — an uncommon occurrence as the majority of plane crashes happen during takeoff or landing.
(emphasis mine)
This is weird.
The flight profile appears to be consistent with a loss of pressure incident, where the pilots try to get down to safe altitude, and if this situation led to a loss of situational awareness as well, it could end with a CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain).
But they should have gotten a call out, or at least change the transponder code to the emergency setting, but they did neither.
Another possibility is some sort of air data sensor problem, but I would expect something like an Air France 447 scenario, with a stall or some other departure under those circumstances.
Also, it appears that while the flight did divert from its assigned altitude, it did not deviate from its planned course.
That’s just plain weird:
- The aircraft appeared under control throughout the flight.
- There was no distress call.
- They did not divert to a nearby airport.
- The aircraft had been checked out by maintenance on the previous day. (First link)
This is, to quote Alice, “Curiouser and curiouser.”
Absent some conspiracy theories that sound like they came from the short-lived X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunman, I am at a loss.
Here’s hoping that the flight data recorder will provide a clue.
This Sh%$ Just Got Real
Thank you Victoria Nuland. You got your coup color revolution you wanted, and now the Russians are making noises about deploying nuclear weapons to the Crimea:
Russia has the right to deploy nuclear arms in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine last year, a Foreign Ministry official said on Wednesday, adding he knew of no plans to do so.
“I don’t know if there are nuclear weapons there now. I don’t know about any plans, but in principle Russia can do it,” said Mikhail Ulyanov, the head of the ministry’s department on arms control, was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.
Note that it’s about 1500 miles from Sevastopol to Birmingham is around 1500 miles, so if the Russians just stationed an SSBN there with its 6000+ mile range missiles, a launch could be made covering all of Europe on a depressed trajectory giving something around 5 minutes warning.
Of course, they could also just drive the mobile version of their Topol missile there as well.
Poking the bear with a stick is not a smart foreign policy move.
It really does not feel me with confidence that the US Government’s foreign and military policy establishment is filled with people who take hubris to this level.
This is nuclear weapons, not tiddly winks.