I’m really surprised at the number of people who think that American Airlines Flight 585 was the victim of terrorism and that the U.S. government is covering up that fact for any number of reasons.
This particular conspiracy theory provides interesting insight into the peculiar ambivalence that people in developed countries have with technology. Specifically, people often tend to be incredulous when technology fails.
So someone like John Robb wonders how both engines could fall off a plane and the NTSB not suspect sabotage (hint, the engines are designed to fall off under certain circumstances in order to increase the survivability of the aircraft).
BlackHoleBrain adds another common theme to these theories — planes don’t just fly out of the sky by themselves.
Or I mean, what else could possibly cause a completely healthy airplane to neuter itself of both engines just minutes after takeoff? The voice recorder proves there was no one on board with box cutters doing the hijacker hand-jive… so it must have been complete and catastrophic, dual engine failure.
How can a “healty” airplane just fall out of the sky? Dozens of different ways, actually. Birds are a huge problem — a U.S. spy plane in Alaska crashed in 1995 because a flock of geese got sucked into the engines.
That’s apparently been ruled out in this crash, but in the cockpit voice recorder the captain of the American Airlines flight is heard to say something suggesting he thought the plain was experiencing wake turbulence (turbulence caused by a preceding jet — there was another jet in the same general flight path, but the two should have been at a safe distance).
Microbursts, pilot error, structural defects, overlooked maintenance problems, volatile cargo — there are many things that can go wrong during flights, but some people are acting as if no airplane ever simply crashed before.
And since he said it, yes Doc Searls speculation that terrorists might have brought the plane down with Stinger missiles was irresponsible. Searls says anything is possible and he’s just being careful, but you have to use some common sense here.
After all, if I were being purely speculative and throwing reason to the wind I might conjecture that a terrorist network wanting to sow fear in the United States one thing might recruit webloggers to whip up frenzy of conspiracy theories, cover ups, and terrorist attacks every time there’s some sort of major accident. And, of course, the CIA probably already knows this but doesn’t want to reveal it to the American public for fear of causing a nationwide panic (plus some of those in question are probably really double agents).