Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

politico.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 211 posts

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#121

Post by C1sc0cat »

simonh wrote: post #83
toomanybeersies wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure someone more qualified and experienced with phone networks can chip in, but from memory this is by design on the phone network, when it gets overloaded it just starts to connect randomly to reduce load. I can't remember exact details, because it's not my area of expertise, but I vaguely remember my father (who's a telecommunications network engineer) talking about it years ago.

That doesn’t seem to make sense on the face of it. Connecting to the wrong number doesn’t reduce load, because the network still has to carry the call. Why not just fail to connect? I know you’re not a network engineer, but it just doesn’t look right.

Yes that does odd - I do know the UK the mobile network is designed so that in case of major emergencies you can shutdown access for subs (normal users) and keep it up for emergency services etc.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#122

Post by bristleworm »

dredmorbius wrote: post #64
paxys wrote: post #60

So weird to see such a detailed article on the critical moments after the attack which basically doesn't even mention the President.

The article is a book exerpt, essentially a chapter of a larger work. The chapter addressing the President, then in Florida, has been posted elsewhere in this thread, it's here: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/were-the-onl...

That was a good read. Thanks for posting! I think I'll have to read that book.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#123

Post by [deleted] »

jacobush wrote: post #99
throwbrow wrote: post #41

I was riding the 7 train from Astoria, Queens, to my job at the big Citigroup tower in Long Island City. It was after the first plane hit and, with the 7 being an outdoor subway line with a great view of the Manhattan skyline, we in the first car could see the gaping hole and smoke billowing. I assumed it was an accident. When I got to work I said dismissively to colleagues, “That must be the dumbest pilot ever.” We…

I was working on a large airport in Europe, on-site. We got notice that US-bound planes were diverted to turn back over the Atlantic and come back to us. Then the news started trickling in. I immediately thought "they are going to hit Iraq for this".

[deleted]

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#124

Post by aedron »

jacobush wrote: post #99
throwbrow wrote: post #41

I was riding the 7 train from Astoria, Queens, to my job at the big Citigroup tower in Long Island City. It was after the first plane hit and, with the 7 being an outdoor subway line with a great view of the Manhattan skyline, we in the first car could see the gaping hole and smoke billowing. I assumed it was an accident. When I got to work I said dismissively to colleagues, “That must be the dumbest pilot ever.” We…

I was working on a large airport in Europe, on-site. We got notice that US-bound planes were diverted to turn back over the Atlantic and come back to us. Then the news started trickling in. I immediately thought "they are going to hit Iraq for this".

Everyone knew they immediately that they were going to carpet bomb Afghanistan. Iraq, I don't think there was any connection.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#125

Post by mkl »

dTal wrote: post #118
philwelch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's also chilling, when you think about it a little more, is that a group of civilian passengers made more or less the same decision, and that's the reason these fighter pilots survived the day .

There's no evidence the passengers suicided. They were attempting to save themselves. There was a struggle in the cockpit, and the aircraft crashed. It may even have been that the terrorists crashed the plane when they realized they weren't going to make it to their target. This meme is unhealthy, and disrepectful to the fallen.

There is no meme. There is no disrespect. There is no claim of suicide in that comment.

Both the passengers and the fighter pilots were willing to do whatever it took to prevent the plane being used to kill a lot more people on the ground. The passengers' phone calls in the article suggest they knew they were likely to die whether acting or not, and as it happened they acted before the fighters could intercept. The article includes conversation of the hijackers in the cockpit deciding to take the plane down before the passengers could get control back.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#126

Post by Gustomaximus »

DMcVeigh wrote: post #113
Gustomaximus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a conspiracy at all. But I could see people having this conversation if they did shoot it down. Maybe to make the victim's family feel better. To avoid lawsuits. Avoid repercussion if they were wrong. Avoid repercussion if we found later this plane was going to hit a building that would have little loss of life vs passenger count. There could be rationale there if people made a panicked decision…

"hit a building that would have little loss of life vs passenger count" You seem to imply that if the plane hits a building all the passengers survive?

Yeah... fair point on that.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#127

Post by lordnacho »

lstamour wrote: post #13
ummonk wrote: post #4

Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001 False: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/911-memory-accura...

Actually the article says that little details like the order of events or where the president was where the parts that folks get wrong. It’s not like I’m going to forget or incorrectly remember that I was in a class at school when it happened and we tuned in live to a TV in a classroom next door that happened to have cable. And how everyone assumed for the first hour or so that it was just this tragic, tragic acciden…

Why would your teachers interrupt class to show you some banal accident? This seems to have happened a lot, according to the comments here. Why on earth would you stop class to show the kids something on TV, ever? Would it not make sense to either send them home due to security concerns, or just finish the school day and let them find out the news later?

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#128

Post by ldite »

isostatic wrote: post #115
dghughes wrote: post #3

I remember working that day (a cool and sunny Tuesday) and each place I went to I asked them to turn on the TV. Nobody was interested in turning on the TV or even changing the channel to any news channel. What I thought had happened was a large aircraft accidentally ran into the Empire State building again like had happened many years ago.

On July 7th 2005 I was on a bbc engineering course in a non-disclosable secret nuclear bunker in the Cotswolds, when my phone started ringing (on vibrate). Multiple times. Eventually got a text message saying the London underground was under attack and was I ok. It was only then I asked for the tv to be put on. The 00s were an eventful time. There’s now more time passed since the London attacks and the ita bombing ca…

> On July 7th 2005 I was on a bbc engineering course in a non-disclosable secret nuclear bunker in the Cotswolds,

This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_Norton,_Worcestershire#Th...

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#129

Post by Steve44 »

sopooneo wrote: post #32
dredmorbius wrote: post #2

This is a phenomenal oral history of the events, learning of, and response to the events of 9/11. If an emergency is a circumstance in which ongoing realities are emergent and aren't predictable based on previous experience or world-models, this is a phenomenal example of those dynamics. Commander Anthony Barnes: That first hour was mass confusion because there was so much erroneous information. It was hard to tell w…

I'm going to piggy-back on this about a certain way information may not add up. I live in Boston, and so do my siblings. We all worked downtown. On the day of the marathon bombing, I immediately called my sister on her cell phone to see if she was okay. Someone that was not my sister picked up, then immediatly hung up after I said who I was looking for. I was immediately terrified. What if my sister had been hurt, dr…

About 20 years ago I was following a friend in a car and we ended up a few cars apart. I called his mobile and just said “which way are we going at the roundabout”. The person on the other end was very confused, it wasn’t my friend but the car directly in front of me. I’ve no idea how that happened but was incredibly bizarre and I think the other driver was more freaked out than I was.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#130

Post by Agentlien »

tialaramex wrote: post #103
Noctem wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I've never heard of that happening. If anyone knows, I'd love to hear a technical explanation of how and why that could occur.

I don't have a technical explanation for how call misrouting can happen except to observe that the endpoints are entirely reliant on the network to get this right, they don't even tell each other "Hi I'm X trying to call Y" and "Hi I'm Y answering a call from X". On Strowger electro-mechanical exchanges one of the nice features is that a random piece of the exchange handles each dialed call. This means the human intu…

I have a friend who, for a few months, had a really strange thing going on with his phone. Any time his phone was off, calls to him would be redirected to someone else. It was another person from the same city, but using a different carrier.

Me, my friend and other friends of his called both companies to report the error multiple times. All we received was scorn and disbelief. We were told, repeatedly, that it simply couldn't happen. But it did, consistently.

It felt really silly when it got to the stage where I'd call my friend, someone else picked up and I'd go "Oh, hi, it's me again". One day, it just stopped happening.

Post reply on HN