F 16s Formate
There are regrettably lunatics who somehow think it is right to kill people they don’t know, who have never and never would, do harm to them and theirs in the name of one cause or another and authorities have a duty to protect the populace against them. It is an aweful responsibility that has to be faced.
The aviation community has its own version of this dilemma but so far has avoided the tragedy that is waiting, of a well meant and indeed commanded shoot down of an innocuous aircraft deemed to be a terrorist threat.
As time goes by without much public debate it seems possible that the time will come. It is now known that Cheney the VP approved the Military to shoot down civilian aircraft under certain circumstance in the wake of 911. There has been a sort of denial arising probably out of the unreality of the situation but the latest incident in the US where a Mooney pilot became unresponsive and eventually crashed raises this important question again. let us have a bit of a think about this
How close did jets come to shooting down an out-of-control plane?
– The F-16 military jets that were tailing a single-engine plane Wednesday before it crashed in a Randolph County corn field were prepared, if necessary, to shoot the aircraft out of the East Central Indiana sky.
“It’s a tough call,” Michael Kucharek, a spokesman for the U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command, told the Associated Press on Thursday. “The pilots that are up there, that’s not something they
want to do, but if they’re called upon to do it, they’ll do it.”
The military jets were scrambled to intercept the plane after its pilot apparently lost consciousness late Wednesday morning during a flight in Michigan.
The plane strayed from a southward course when it reached the greater Muncie area, which it circled before hitting a tree line in northwestern Randolph County and crashed into the field along Ind. 28 east of
Fairview.
Kucharek told the AP that the decision to fire on a civilian plane would be made at the highest levels of the military, with likely involvement by the White House. Then -Vice President Dick Cheney had given the military permission to fire on incoming civilian aircraft during the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.
Authorities on Wednesday night removed the body of the plane’s pilot — assumed to be the aircraft’s owner, David Joseph Eyde, 42, of Michigan. An autopsy was conducted Thursday at Ball Memorial Hospital, but formal identification was not expected to come before next week, after Randolph County Coroner Duane Petry and pathologists review Eyde’s medical and dental records.
Todd Fox, the National Transportation Safety Board investigator assigned to the case, said during a Thursday teleconference that a fire that engulfed the plane immediately after it crashed “consumed the majority of the cabin cockpit, including the passenger-occupant area.” The NTSB probe will focus in part on the plane’s oxygen system, some of which has been recovered at the crash site.
Authorities speculated Wednesday that the pilot might have lost consciousness due to a lack of oxygen when the plane reached an altitude of up to 25,000 feet.
The plane, a single-engine M20M Mooney, is
capable of flying at such heights, but
pilots are required to have supplemental
oxygen at altitudes of 14,000 feet or
higher.
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Fox said the plane’s pilot took off from a
Grand Rapids, Mich., airport at 9:44 a.m.
Wednesday, and informed air traffic
controllers he intended to make a “round-
robin flight” north to Traverse City, Mich.,
where he intended to turn around, without
landing, and head back to Grand Rapids.
The pilot — then flying at an altitude of
23,900 feet — said in a radio transmission
at 10:09 a.m. that he was making the turn to
return to Grand Rapids.
His last communication with controllers came
at 10:11 a.m., when the plane’s altitude was
at 25,000 feet.
The pilot did not respond to air traffic
controllers asking when he intended to make
a descent to land at Grand Rapids, at 10:39
a.m., and he was not heard from again.
“We have no indication of the pilot’s intent
to come to Muncie,” Fox said, and there was
no immediate explanation for why the plane
left its southbound course and circled the
Muncie area, beginning the wayward descent
that ended in Randolph County.
A preliminary report on the crash is
expected within two weeks, but a “factual”
report on the cause of the accident might
take up to a year to complete.
The plane, which lost both of its wings when
it struck trees near the Mississinewa River,
was removed from the corn field late
Wednesday, according to Indiana State Police
Sgt. Rod Russell.
The burned aircraft was taken to a salvage
yard near downtown Muncie, where it remained
on Thursday.
Delaware County Sheriff George Sheridan
credited local response to the crash to many
hours of training involving numerous police,
fire and ambulance agencies as well as a
speedy flow of information that began with
air traffic controllers then extended to
military authorities and the FBI then local
law enforcement.
Sheridan — who was completing a third day
of required firearms training on Muncie’s
east side at the time the emergency began —
was notified by a deputy of the wayward
plane.
“Communication from the state and Homeland
Security was coming into 911, and that
information was immediately relayed to us in
the field,” Sheridan said.
“It’s a matter of literally minutes how fast
all that goes,” the sheriff added. “These
agencies all train together. There’s a lot
of cross-pollination that goes on with these
agencies.
“I think yesterday’s response could be
attributed to the amount of training
everybody’s done since 9-11,” he added.
“From the air traffic controller once they
lost contact and the aircraft started coming
our way, all emergency services are notified
and it went all the way up and down the
chain the way it should.”
From
www.thestarpress.com/article/20091002/NEWS01
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