Mystery 'Missile' Identified As US Airways Flight 808 335
sean.peters writes "The mystery missile discussed on Slashdot Tuesday? It was US Airways 808 from Honolulu to Phoenix. An amateur sleuth checked the time against airline schedules, then the following day, checked out a webcam that was trained in the appropriate direction. He found the exact same contrail at the time AWE808 was coming over. The author deals persuasively with a number of objections to his argument."
Oops (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
So I'm assuming you'll provide a decent, sane way to falsify your hypothesis? Or are you just going to reject every amount of data as possibly (sorry, I meant obviously) being tainted by THEM and part of your scary scary conspiracy?
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that you can verify. You can look up the what time this flight left. You can use a bit of deductive reasoning, a little bit of knowledge about flight paths, and the publicly available Standard Instrument Departures for the given airport to figure out an approximate location and altitude that the plane would be at a given time. You can even, apparently, if the summary is accurate, look back at random webcams that were pointing in the right direction at the right time to see if the plane is there and leaving a contrail.
So yeah, if you believe that the government can create that good of a cover story with that much independent evidence in a 36 hour period, well, you have more faith in government agencies than I do.
Server down, contrail explanation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yup, shows how easy it is to fool people (Score:2, Insightful)
What however I usually find most intresting is the story behind the story.
Why did it take this long and an amateur to figure it all out? Why wasn't CBS called within minutes of the airing that this was nothing, that aircraft X flying from Y and landing at Z at XX:XX was it, that radar had it on track the whole time and that this flight passes over daily and does pretty much the same thing?
It shows a kink in the line of communication somewhere that this was cleared up almost immediately. And no, I am not saying the US military HAS to answer every question, but when a story breaks out like this and reaches around the globe, the military should have a better answer then "we don't what it is, we are fairly certain it wasn't our missle, but what it was, we don't know".
For everyone who thinks the Chinese would for instance NOT have dared to fire a missle this close as a show of power. The USA with Bomber Harris send US bomber aircraft capable of carrying nukes on flights over Russia. Do you think the US has a monopoly on mad men?
That it was nothing does not mean it will always be nothing and why does the military get so much of the US taxpayers money if they can't even tell us what was flying over California?
It is not a contrail. (Score:1, Insightful)
This is the internet, people. You must refer to it as a CHEMTRAIL.
Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
No wonder the amateur got the story (Score:5, Insightful)
Wish there are more such amateurs tracking the money and misinformation spread by everyone about politics.
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
More likely, the FAA and DoD just aren't organized for this kind of investigation. If you had gotten on the phone with the FAA or an AFB while the thing was in the air and said "What the heck is that? It's tracking heading 270, at somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand feet", you would could have gotten the answer instantly: "identifies as flight 808 out of LA". As it is, it seems like no one was really interested in this until it got put on the news that night, well after it would beyond radar range. So far as I know, the airports and Air Force bases don't keep recordings of their radar tracks, they have no way to look back at what was happening at that time.
Re:With all our technology... (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume that by "we" you mean CBS news.
Re:ok, maybe it's part of this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yup, shows how easy it is to fool people (Score:3, Insightful)
It shows a kink in the line of communication somewhere that this was cleared up almost immediately. And no, I am not saying the US military HAS to answer every question, but when a story breaks out like this and reaches around the globe, the military should have a better answer then "we don't what it is, we are fairly certain it wasn't our missle, but what it was, we don't know".
It took the Air Force 18 years to tell itself and its commanders that UFOs were just optical illusions and weather balloons. And they still haven't officially told the public-at-large anything.
If it's not a threat, and it has no potential as a military technology or other funding source, it's not interesting. It has other things to do, specifically those involving threats, operations, or funding sources. I mean advanced technology development.
I can't get my cats interested in The Discovery Channel or Slashdot, either. But they are very keenly interested in when I open a can of soup (or, as far as they know, possibly canned cat food). Pretty much the same phenomenon.
Re:space shuttle (Score:5, Insightful)
The battle cry of the uninformed conspiracy theorist...
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps the DoD have had a bit too much experience with the public rushing off to some half-baked conclusion, so they ignore the public in events that don't raise their alarms.
I mean, it's not like the DoD hasn't had to put up with the hundreds of UFO sightings a year that get generated in the USA. If these UFO sightings were just "I couldn't identify it" then perhaps they wouldn't be so dismissive; but, when the sightings are more in line with "What do you mean it's not an INVASION from OUTER SPACE! You're already under control of the off-worlders, AREN'T YOU?!?!" it's a safe bet to ignore the whole lot.
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:3, Insightful)
So all webmasters all over the world are expected to keep logs of all tiny details and all files requests for months if not years to come from thousands if not millions of visitors per day.
And the FAA don't keep logs of what happens in radar range?
Yep, it's a crazy world alright.
Re:I don't care. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen two, very slightly different, angles of the object and the orange light is only present in one of them. Seems to me that a rocket exhaust should be quite visible regardless of the angle, and that it's appearance/disappearance would make a reflection seem more likely. As for the contrail forming right on the object, if it is an airplane most of it's velocity is directly away from the camera. There could be a mile between the contrail and the plane and from that angle it would look like they were right next to each other.
I remain unconvinced (Score:2, Insightful)
I've never seen an airplane contrail look like that before. While that's not evidence that that's not what it is, I've seen lots of missiles that look like that. The video really makes it look like a missile to me. You can also see an airplane nearby in the video, so which flight is that? If it was flight 808 wouldn't it have been low like the passenger plane in the video? Why was it so much higher? Why was it leaving an enormous unusual contrail while the other plane wasn't?
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:2, Insightful)
So yeah, if you believe that the government can create that good of a cover story with that much independent evidence in a 36 hour period, well, you have more faith in government agencies than I do.
This is the U.S. government we're talking about here. See hurricane Katrina.
Re:Dag-nabbit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on what you mean by air defense. If you mean an automated system that can shoot down ballistic missiles then no. There has been work on that off and on, that's what the whole "Star Wars" project is/was. However nothing operational at this point, or at least nothing that is admitted to (and that is the kind of system where publicly admitting it is useful).
In terms of defense against air attacks? Yes, tons. The US has a bunch of air bases all around its borders. The Air Force and Air National Guard operated bases in most states with fighters (F-16s and F-22s mostly) to deal with threats. In terms of tracking incoming craft, that is done on a continuous basis by massive radar installations. The PAVE PAWS radar arrays provide complete coverage of the US borders out to very long distances (like 3000km). All inbound craft are tracked and known.
So what's the deal here? Well the deal is nothing happened, that's what. There was nothing out of the ordinary so nobody noticed anything. All commercial flights are well known. They file flight plans, keep ground controllers appraised of their progress, and show up on civilian radar. See the radar you get at airports actually isn't normal radar. It doesn't track any object in the sky, it is Secondary Surveillance Radar. Rather what it is doing is looking for transponders. All commercial and private planes have to have one that say who they are. So what happens, more or less, is the radar says "Hi who are you?" and the plane responds "This is my callsign." Works great and makes tracking much easier, you don't have to have someone analyze the radar signals to tell if they are real returns or not (radar can get returns off of birds, air currents, etc if the power is high enough) and you can keep easy track of what everything is.
A plane that has an active transponder and a known flight plan is nothing out of the ordinary. There are thousands a day. So nobody takes any notice, that is shit working how it should. So when the military was asked "Did you do this?" they truthfully answered "No we didn't." When the FAA was asked "Did you see anything weird?" they again truthfully said "No we didn't." Because neither had seen anything weird, no evidence of any problems, they didn't go digging. The military isn't going to go all crazy because there is a picture of a contrail. The PAVE PAWS in Beale didn't see anything problematic, who gives a shit?
I am guessing IUSS was also clear of any unknown subs and so on.
Nobody noticed anything because there was nothing to notice, except visually, and neither the DOD or FAA check that because it isn't useful. Everything in terms of monitoring was fine. They may have opened an inquiry in to what happened so they could give people an answer, but that can take time since it isn't high priority and you want to give a correct answer. Or they may have just not given a shit since it was clearly just someone who'd snapped a picture of a jet and didn't know what it was. They knew it was NOT a missile as that would have been tracked.
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not bizarre. It depends what you presume.
Presume the DoD *did* do it. Ok, then they should be able to get an answer out pretty quickly. You know, a cover story or whatever.
Assume they *didn't* do it. They obviously aren't paying much attention. Nobody on watch called the DoD and said "Hey, just want to let you know, a jet just left a contrail. Thought I'd notify you." So the DoD know they didn't do it, assume it is not a missile, and thus don't care. Why assign someone to look into it? They DID give a public answer, didn't they? Or at least, parts of the armed forces did: they denied it. That's an answer, isn't it? It's not necessarily up to them to investigate, quickly, every single jet contrail that someone says "ahhhh it's a missile launch!"
So if you presume the DoD didn't do it, then 36 hours isn't bad. Apparently, the media doesn't really care. Afterall, a "it was a jet flying a normal pathway" story isn't going to sell much. On the other hand, a "secret missile test [in broad daylight]" story is a good seller.
So maybe: the armed forces/DoD/Pentagon didn't do it. The news media don't care because they realize they didn't do it, and a story about a jet taking off isn't very interesting. So it only took 36 hours for a random guy to put all the pieces together and give a good answer.
Re:I don't care. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen two, very slightly different, angles of the object and the orange light is only present in one of them. Seems to me that a rocket exhaust should be quite visible regardless of the angle, and that it's appearance/disappearance would make a reflection seem more likely. As for the contrail forming right on the object, if it is an airplane most of it's velocity is directly away from the camera. There could be a mile between the contrail and the plane and from that angle it would look like they were right next to each other.
Actually, I think the aircraft theory is that the airliner was approaching the camera; the flight was eastbound, coming over the western horizon, and the helicopter was over land. Yes, I'm nit-picking. But at a reasonably high azimuth (45 degrees?), you're not really looking head on at an aircraft.
As for the missile theory, if was pitching over to a westbound trajectory, might not the plume hide the flame from an observer to the east at some point?
Yeah, I'm straining a bit. Occam's Razor favors the airliner.
Re:Daily Show (Score:1, Insightful)
The Daily Show hasn't moved into real news, "real news" moved into comedy.
Re:What about the air force? (Score:3, Insightful)
The military correctly identified it as nothing of interest.
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the bizarre thing - why did it take 36 hours to get an answer and why didn't the definitive answer come from a definitive source?
So it was flight 808. Either the DoD and FAA were unable to figure that out in short order or else they just don't care about giving the public answers to those kind of questions.
Neither one of those possibilities is particularly good.
The comments in the original slashdot story had people saying it was the contrail of an airliner. I believe someone even linked to someones blog who had done a lot of leg work and found that it was flight 808 and even compared it to a similar sighting on 2009-12-31. For some reason the news media didn't want to actually investigate this even though all the facts were out there.
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uhmm.. (Score:1, Insightful)
You know it was coming from Hawaii, right? I don't think anyone saw it take off from L. A.
Insightful? Who is modding these days? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't care. (Score:4, Insightful)
Occam cannot apply, without a full accounting for all data. You don't use the razor when data may be unavailable due to concealment by an actor.
Re:Dag-nabbit. (Score:2, Insightful)
But that's not all that happened.
The entire American journalism force lit up like a christmas tree, and proceeded to prod the military and FAA for information. The military and FAA stood up professional public-affairs personnel who, instead of saying "this is a commercial airliner that we knew was coming and have a track of in our logs", or "let me make a phone call", were prepared with and delivered "we don't know."
Which, come to think of it, bugs the fuck out of me. This is something that should have been easy to check in existing records, and their choice was to stonewall, as if that's policy when the public wants an answer that can only be had with technology and information-handling authority we've delegated (along with money to fund it) to the military and FAA.
Who's running this country, anyway?
Re:Dag-nabbit. (Score:3, Insightful)
How could they do that with only a vague description of the location and direction?
They did check their radar records and found nothing.
Not the newsies, fortunately.
Re:Airplane Contrail? (Score:3, Insightful)
> Didn't this appear to rise from the Pacific?
This morning I watched a contrail appear to rise from central Wisconsin...
Re:I don't care. (Score:5, Insightful)
But you do apply the razor when evaluating whether or not someone is actively concealing data.
There were hundreds of thousands of digital cameras in range of this event, and there's not one image from another angle that clearly shows a rocket launch instead of an aircraft contrail which has been posted to flickr. Is it simpler to think that all such images have been suppressed, or that there simply never were any?
Why should have it been easy to check on? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know how the radars track things? Do you know how the data is stored an analyzed? Do you know what procedures are in place for answering civilian inquiries on this? If you don't know, and it is clear you don't, then why should it be "easy"?
What you are doing more or less is arguing from ignorance, you are doing the same shit stupid managers to do IT and developers all over: "I don't understand how this works so I assume it is easy, and I get mad that you cannot deliver it to me easily and quickly." You know fuck-all about what you are talking about, so you just assume it should be "easy" and that they are either incompetent or evil because they won't just pop off an answer straight away.
Re:What about the air force? (Score:2, Insightful)
Something came into our air space and they could not identify it.
We don't even know if they were asked to identify it; you're making assumptions.
The press just asked if it was their missile. They said no (correct answer). That's all we know.
Unless you know something we don't, there's not nearly enough information here to jump to your hasty conclusion that the military is incompetent and we're all going to die.
Re:Dag-nabbit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, the idiot content on Slashdot never ceases to amaze, especially for a site where the users value themselves as being smart geeks. A statement like that only makes you look like a colossal moron with regards to air defense, and to the events of 9/11 themselves.
The whole reason that worked as it did was precisely because it was a terrorist act, using civilian airliners. Nobody realized anything was wrong until it was too late. Why? Because they were supposed to be there. These were scheduled commercial flights, they were squawking idents, everything seemed fine. The US does not go around shooting down all commercial airline traffic, for good reason.
All that has absolutely nothing to do with air defense in terms of hostile craft coming in from outside the borders, which is what is begin talked about. If an airline enters US airspace and it isn't scheduled and/or isn't transmitting ident as it should, some fighters will come to meet it. Actually they meet it long before it gets to US airspace, when it got to US airspace would be when it would get shot down.
This happens all the time with Russian Bear bombers. In a silly "Our military penis is as big as your military penis," game, they send Bears over to the US coast. They are traced by PAVE PAWS, and F-16s fly up to escort them. They fly around, and then return home. Nothing comes of it because they aren't breaking any rules, however if they continued towards the US and breached US airspace, they'd get splashed (Bears are designed to carry nuclear weapons).
If the difference between that and 9/11 aren't apparent to you, well, then I don't know what to do to help you.
Re:Dag-nabbit. (Score:3, Insightful)
"The military and FAA stood up professional public-affairs personnel who, instead of saying "this is a commercial airliner that we knew was coming and have a track of in our logs", or "let me make a phone call", were prepared with and delivered "we don't know."
Which, come to think of it, bugs the fuck out of me."
It bothers you that professional public affairs personnel told the truth? You would have preferred that they speculate? Seriously?!?
I suggest that you watch less television. It's rotting your brain.
Re:Sounds like the standard counter intelligence (Score:4, Insightful)
I was flying on a plane once, and we we just above some big, fluffy clouds. I looked out the window and saw a dark, oval shape, that almost looked like a flying saucer in the distance. I stared at it for about a minute or so, wondering "What could that possibly be?", then looked away; when I looked back, it was gone.
Therefore Barack Obama is an alien sent to enslave humankind.
Re:Dag-nabbit. (Score:1, Insightful)
[...] The military and FAA stood up professional public-affairs personnel who, instead of saying "this is a commercial airliner that we knew was coming and have a track of in our logs", or "let me make a phone call", were prepared with and delivered "we don't know."
Please note that USAF's and UNS's answer was 'we don't know', in the sense that it wasn't theirs. As others have noted, there was nothing unusual, nothing to track, and not enough information to give a definitive answer.
I'd prefer our military NOT be sent off chasing every contrail spotted by every ignorant local TV newscaster. (Yes, I realize the redundancy).
The FAA saw nothing unusual, USAF saw nothing unusual, USN saw nothing unusual. Someone with no clue thought there was something unusual, and made a bunch of noise.
Guess what? Nothing unusual. I suggest you go back to memorizing the melting point of steel.
Re:I don't care. (Score:3, Insightful)
pics or it didn't happen
Re:Dag-nabbit. (Score:4, Insightful)
You have 20/20 hindsight right now. You KNOW that those airliners were hijacked and you KNOW that they were going to cause more destruction than just flying around. What was known at the time of the incident was far different than what you know now.
Following 9/11, in Chicago, there was an incident where that guy was trying to light his shoes. I was working in the suburbs at the time, and recall hearing a pair of air cracking booms out of nowhere. When the confusion was settled and the news was revealed, it became apparent that those booms were a pair of fighter jets tearing into Chicago airspace to play escort to that airliner.
To me, that tells me that we were and are capable of responding appropriately to air defense even within the borders of the US. What it also tells me is that, if anyone knew that those planes were hijacked before they hit the towers, they probably expected them to be flown elsewhere, not used as weapons. Don't forget that the terrorists knew how to fly a plane, and once in control of the cockpit, it is unlikely that any radio communications would have indicated a problem. Only flight position would have betrayed a problem, but as you may recall, we've had airliners overfly their landing site and continue for .. what, an hour or two, without communication, before a response was sent.
Its easy to see problems that have already happened. It's less easy to see problems before they occur.
Re:I don't care. (Score:4, Insightful)
The other point is, there's nothing at all here to show that it's not a jet plume. It looks exactly like a jet contrail would look. It looks exactly like contrails seen in the past that people have mistaken for missiles. Why didn't anyone else see the missile if it was really there? What about flight 808 that was passing by at the same time, surely they saw something if there was a missile there?
Of course the conspiracy theorists like to say "then why hasn't the government expended time and money to debunk this?"
Re:And, sadly enough (Score:3, Insightful)
If this was a big missile it was the slowest missile in history.
Don't forget the German V1 from WWII, over two thousand of which shot down by propeller planes. Missiles don't have to be faster than a transoceanic jet plane.
Re:I don't care. (Score:1, Insightful)
WTF? Is that the most specious reasoning ever? Occam cannot apply without a full accounting for all data. If that holds true, then Occam can never apply. "May be unavailable due to concealment by an actor" is also sophistry. So if someone says that the simpler explanation fits, then the response (for someone in opposition to that particular stance) would always be "but data may be unavailable."
Sorry I reacted so vehemently. I think the problem is that you're treating all these arguments as if they're meant to be eternal--or at least timeless. The point of Occam's razor isn't to choose who's "right" or which argument "wins." The point is to be able to settle on something to move on. If new information comes to light, then you deal with it when that new information comes to light.
In this particular case, we have two explanations, both of which have some evidence. Until new information is offered, the recommended actions will be based on the simpler explanation. That's all. And that's exactly why Occam's razor does, can, and should apply here.