I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

MYSTERIES OF THE UNEX-PLANE-D

So much plane-related news over the past couple of days. I spent most of yesterday evening riveted by the spectacle of a mostly intact Southwest Airlines 737-300 slowly getting covered by snow while sitting in an intersection at the northwestern tip of Chicago's Midway Airport. It was almost an exact rerun of another "plane skids off runway through fence into street" incident I remember watching in March 2000: same airline (Southwest Airlines), same kind of plane (Boeing 737-300), different airport (Burbank International Airport) but similar circumstances (older airport on a relative "postage stamp" of land with short runways "hemmed-in" by residential and commercial development). It's not an exact rerun, since Burbank has its runways in a cross pattern while Midway's runways form an "X", meaning the plane in the Burbank incident just ended up in the middle of a road, not an intersection where there's more of a chance that the plane would hit a vehicle, and snow visibility and runway icing wouldn't have been a factor in a runway overshoot crash in Burbank, California, obviously, but, still, the incidents are similar enough to be remarkable.

There was also a crash of an Iranian military transport C-130 into an apartment building in Tehran, killing at least 116 people including at least 24 people on the ground. And the shooting of Looney McCrazyGoNutsUniversity Rigoberto Alpizar, a manic-depressive man, by federal Air Marshals on a boarding ramp at Miami International Airport after getting off an American Airlines flight from Cartagena, Colombia. He may or may not have claimed that he had a bomb (but it's always easy to second guess people who have to make split second decisions where lack of action may have deadly consequences).

The aviation-related incident that I was really wondering about, though, was something that may or may not have happened off the New Brunswick coast on Wednesday morning.

From Bloomberg:

"Canadian search-and-rescue officials said reports that a plane crashed in New Brunswick, near the Maine border, are ``false.''

``We have no indication of any crash,'' said Lucie Vignola, a spokeswoman for Transport Canada in Ottawa. She said search and rescue operations in Halifax have been shut down, as all military planes are accounted for and no civilian planes were reported missing. She said a Hercules plane was conducting low-flying exercises, which could have been confused for a plane in trouble.

Rescue planes searched the Bay of Fundy where the plane reportedly went down and found no wreckage, a Fisheries and Oceans department official said in a recorded message.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that a four- engine aircraft crashed, citing eyewitnesses and local radio stations. The report was based on a single claim of a small aircraft in distress, the official said.

``At this point, we're unaware that any aircraft has crashed at all,'' National Defense Department spokesman 2nd Lt. Adam Thompson said."

See, I got up early (like just after 9 a.m., which is an ungodly hour for me) on Wednesday because I overheard my mother mentioning a plane crash in New Brunswick and tuned in to CBC Newsworld and CTV NewsNet, who were all over this story like French Canadian girls at a Backstreet Boys concert for about an hour or so before "they" declared it to be nothing and the story disappeared as quickly as Chumbawumba's popularity did at the beginning of 1998.

So, it led me to wonder: was it really nothing? Or was it something that "they" didn't want "us" to see? Maybe it was nothing but people thinking a low-flying Hercules plane was in trouble, or maybe... it could have been a crash of something "above top secret" like, say, a hypersonic (above Mach 5) jet like the "Aurora", since, if it was hypersonic, that would explain the "explosion" the eyewitnesses claimed to hav seen (not really an explosion, it's just that the "stagnant" air that doesn't flow around the plane would ignite as part of the normal flying process). Or maybe some other "black project" even more top secret than that, like, maybe, something suborbital, perhaps with a skin that's a giant LCD screen, projecting what's on the other side of the plane to give it pseudo-invisibility (the same general concept as the Ford Thunderbird in the James Bond movie Die Another Day or Major Motoko Kusanagi's "thermo-optic camouflage" from the Ghost in the Shell manga/anime franchise). Something manufactured by Lockheed's "Skunk Works" and launched out of Groom Lake, Nevada (popularly known as "Area 51") or Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Something that would only be visible to people on the ground if something went seriously, seriously wrong. And, as for the absence of wreckage, if something did go catastrophically wrong, it could be that the plane was guided towards a remote area near the American border where some sort of super-secret underwater recovery vessel was dispatched.

This all is purely idle speculation based on popular rumours seen on things like speculative documentaries on Discovery (and by the time any "leaked" information about that sort of thing makes it to the Discovery Channel, it's probably very obsolete "old news" as far as the people who work on the technological vanguard "black ops" projects are concerned). I doubt anything like that happened and am just spouting conspiratorial bullshit to tease my few readers (so, USAF, please don't come and visit my house with the syringes full of Sodium Pentothal or whatever substance works even better than that), but I still find it very mysterious that the news about the "crash", even if it was unreliable, had pretty much evaporated by the time that the lunchtime newscasts had rolled around, almost as if they were told to stop reporting on it (yes, I know the shooting of the suspect at Miami International Airport dominated the news on both sides of the border that evening, but that was several hours after the crash story vanished from the news).

posted by Steve Brandon @ 6:04 PM