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Politics : Homeland Security -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jill who wrote (559)	11/16/2001 5:54:48 PM
From: b-witch	Respond to of 827

How common were these type of "incidents" in the airline industry prior to 9/11, does anyone know?

To: Jill who wrote (559)	11/16/2001 6:11:23 PM
From: RocketMan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 827

Does it seem to you that we have entered the Twilight Zone with all of these strange coincidences? My first reaction is that we are hearing about all incidents now, where in the past they occured just as frequently but we didn't hear about them. However, the coincidences seem strange- like two SW jets, like two AA jets from Santo Domingo, etc. On the A300 flight, the more I read and research, the more I am led to conclude that it a failure of the composites in the tail was the immediate cause of the accident, and the violent jerking around after that tore off the engines. Which is pretty much what the official investigators are also arriving at. That doesn't say what may have weakened the composites, though. The composites I'm familiar with in space vehicles work well, but they are thoroughly tested beforehand, and typically only get stressed once, on launch. On sailboats, OTOH, there have been some spectacular failures, such as the Australian boat that lost its keel in the America's Cup. That keel was bonded to composites in the hull. Similar accidents have occured on other performance sailboats, and the mach numbers under water correspond roughly with supersonic flight, so the stresses are equal, or somewhat higher, and you also have lateral forces to deal with. That AA flight may have had microcracks in the composites, just waiting for a lateral force to snap it off, and the wake turbulence may have done it. Composites don't give a lot of warning before they snap, they can be brittle, and delamination is hard to spot unless one does a thorough inspection. Since aircraft are painted so regularly, delamination would not be obvious. Now, if this is the problem, then the entire industry has to worry, because the airbus is used in a lot of passenger fleets, as well as fedex and ups, and other designs are adopting composites. On the other hand, there are ways of weakening composites, and a dedicated terrorist mechanic could, say, hide inside the plane overnight in Santo Domingo and create some problems. That particular flight has been going between Santo Domingo and NY for a long time (there is even a merengue about it), and they have probably used the same aircraft quite often, so the opportunity is there. I doubt is an arab terrorist could do this and remain undetected, but we do have other enemies, and Castro has been a sleeper so far. We know he has sympathizers in the Caribbean, and by the way, we also know he has been developing biochemical weapons, and has easy access to south Florida.... ok, enough rambling... I think I'm going paranoid <g> On Castro: newaus.com.au