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

101–110 of 211 posts

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

#101

Post by koonsolo »

simonh wrote: post #97
koonsolo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got downvoted, but still there is no certainty on this. Fighter planes were there, they knew where they were headed. Shooting down the plane above non-residential area seemed like the best option. On the other hand, passengers overmastering the terrorist through the cockpit door already seems unlikely, and more unlikely still once overmastered, not trying to land safely. So yeah, bringing news that you shot down…

I'm comfortable there is certainty. There is considerable evidence that the passengers attacked the hijackers, from multiple different sources including mobile calls from passengers to family, air traffic control and the plane's black box. Each one of these lines of evidence involved at least dozens of people who would know there was a cover up, maybe hundreds. None of the people involved in accumulating that evidenc…

> I'm comfortable there is certainty.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/unanswered...

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

#102

Post by simonh »

malandrew wrote: post #95
simonh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well it could reduce load if making a call is a much more expensive than a connected call. If the call, fails, I’ll try calling back and so will others. If I’m connected, I first need to establish comms with the person on the other end and determine it’s a misconmection before I can hang up and try again.

That's not the case though, the networks are all bandwidth constrained and connecting a call consumes negligible bandwidth. I'm not a radio or network engineer, but I used to work with them supporting cellular network panning software so I'm familiar with some aspects of the technology.

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

#103

Post by tialaramex »

Noctem wrote: post #33
sopooneo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 intuitive approach of "Huh, that didn't work, I'll hang up and try again" actually had a pretty good chance of success if the problem is an electrical fault or something rather than you wrote the number down incorrectly.

I did have a morning once where every call I received was for a business in a Welsh village (I live in England) and the callers were as confused as I was that they'd reached a personal mobile phone instead. The problem resolved itself before it made me annoyed rather than confused.

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

#105

Post by scarejunba »

koonsolo wrote: post #84
plutonorm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, it seems a little convenient that they didn't have to shoot the plane down. Do we have any evidence that they didn't shoot the plane down and then construct the passengers saving the day story after the fact?

You got downvoted, but still there is no certainty on this. Fighter planes were there, they knew where they were headed. Shooting down the plane above non-residential area seemed like the best option. On the other hand, passengers overmastering the terrorist through the cockpit door already seems unlikely, and more unlikely still once overmastered, not trying to land safely. So yeah, bringing news that you shot down…

Right, but then you say "We would have shot them down anyway" and then what's the point?

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

#106

Post by smdyc1 »

gigatexal wrote: post #50

Not sure I can read the article 9/11 was a traumatic experience for me. I remember vividly where I was and what I was doing and who I called and virtually everything about that day. I almost joined the military in response such was my reaction.

I actually did, joined joined the Air Force 3 years later as soon as I turned 18. Only recently got out after 10 years. I was on holiday at the time with my family, and we saw the first news at at a train station when we were waiting for a connection. It had a tremendous impact on me at the time. Once we got to our hotel, we were glued to the TV 10 hours afterwards, and I can vividly remember the horror of watching replay after replay of those planes hitting the towers.

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

#107

Post by simonh »

koonsolo wrote: post #101
simonh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm comfortable there is certainty. There is considerable evidence that the passengers attacked the hijackers, from multiple different sources including mobile calls from passengers to family, air traffic control and the plane's black box. Each one of these lines of evidence involved at least dozens of people who would know there was a cover up, maybe hundreds. None of the people involved in accumulating that evidenc…

> I'm comfortable there is certainty. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/unanswered...

If the plane had been blown up by a bomb or shot down, it would have broken up into chunks which would have landed largely intact, because fuselage sections are quite light compared to their volume. You can see this in pictures of other downed or bombed planes, such as the one shot down over Ukraine. Most of the bodies would have fallen out of the plane or come down in the fuselage sections and been mostly intact. Bombs and missiles simply don't destroy the whole vehicle so completely.

The only way the bodies could all have been so thoroughly destroyed is if the plane smashed into the ground as a single piece under power at full speed, which would require full control authority for the pilot. Even if it had drifted or spun into the ground, perhaps due to loss of control from a small bomb or weapon damage, it would have been too slow for the observed effect, because we know what those crashes look like as well. The speculative electronic interference weapons would also have induced a more conventional crash, not one at full speed under power.

Also the article even opens with an eye witness account of the intact plane hitting the ground under power, the witness even describes the engine noise.

It is possible a small bomb or grenade did go off, but wasn't powerful enough to disable the plane. However if it did happen that just supports or at least is consistent with the passenger revolt theory.

What the article tries to do is throw out as much information presented in as discordant a way as possible, to create openings for speculation. However the conspiracy scenarios presented don't actually fit the evidence at all. all the rest about mysterious planes and such is irrelevant noise to the facts of the crash itself.

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

#108

Post by FartyMcFarter »

I can't be the only one who, after 9/11, had recurring nightmares about trying to evacuate from a building that had been hit by a plane? They have stopped some years ago, but lasted for quite a few years.

That said, the most dangerous thing is what society does to itself as a response to terrorism fears. Terrorism needs to be kept in perspective, as it's far from the biggest danger facing us.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

Wildgoose wrote: post #100

What amazed me was how quickly the responsible parties were identified. Just about the only website that kept up in England was Slashdot and the discussions about who and what was happening very rapidly provided the disparate pieces of information required. Truly the Wisdom of Crowds.

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by TeMPOraL »

throwaway091019 wrote: post #89
c22 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, otherwise the OP is just describing Burning Man.

Interesting comparison. Burning Man is managed as an ongoing emergency, and has a 24/7 multi-disciplinary team responding to and triaging incidents as they arise. Essentially Burning Man is a disaster that's been intentionally paused just before a tragedy. It's kept at that point by some very coordinated and talented people.

Well, it's a burning man after all, not a burnt man :).

Jokes aside, I like this characterization. Makes me think of other cases where a system is designed to be unstable and is then being carefully balanced at the edge of failure; see e.g. modern fighter jets.

Post reply on HN