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A Question For Real Airline Pilots



 
 
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  #31  
Old May 29th 04, 05:26 AM
Kevin Darling
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Posts: n/a
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"Blue" wrote in message ...
I have heard that most if not all of the heavies now flying have special
equipment in them to thwart hijacking. The equipment that I am referring to
is not just an autopilot which is standard but additional mechanical devices
to completely remove control from the cockpit making it possible to take
control away from the flight officers and giving that control to an outside
pilot which could be in a following aircraft or at an airport or anywhere.


It's a moot question.

There's no need for such a setup now. Cockpit doors have been
reinforced, pilots won't open it even if everyone's being killed in
back, heavies with large fuel loads probably have an air marshall
aboard.

In short, it's doubtful that another 9/11 can take place in the same
way as before, at least with passenger airliners.
  #32  
Old September 3rd 04, 04:41 PM
rottenberg
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ShoarmaBoy wrote in message . 34...
This is true for normal military aircraft where they use it already.
But i don't think this is going to be inserted in real life boeing 737NG's
or other commercial airliners because this also is a system that can be
hijacked. If they break into the control room. Also than you should be
able to hack the system if it's a remote system to be able to be controled
from the ground...
Never thought of that?

Tom
(Boeing 737NG command officer)


Let's not forget that it also requires fewer men - instead of breaking
into three cockpits, you can break into one control room for three
planes (and likly nore planes than that). That's the sort of logical
gap that obviously eluded Blue, along with his devoted acceptance of
conspiracy theories that at least border on libel.
  #33  
Old September 4th 04, 01:44 AM
Blue
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Default

My, my. this thread just won't die! And now I have a hated adversary to
boot.

On topic, I have been on top of the World Trade Center and was surprised by
the many planes in the air surrounding it. The planes would have to have
been flown by a following plane. Also, the Pennslyvania plane was followed
by an unmarked Gulfstream jet such as Cheney uses.

Also, when JFK took over the CIA presented him with a plan eerily like the
one used for 911 including a plane switch of a CIA lookalike for a civilian
plane which would be remotely flown over Cuba and destroyed there to incite
American lemmings into supporting a war with little guy Cuba who had just
kicked George Bush SR's ass with his hair-brained Bay of Pigs invasion .
JFK , crossed him up by refusing to support the mess. To the plan for a
false downing of an American passenger jet he did the unthinkable, he sent
RFK to the military chest beaters where he announced: " My big brother says
for you guys to stick your kill Cuber plans up your asses." There had been
several of them. (or words to that effect.)

The principal operator there, Bush Sr, not only didn't forgive that he was
arrested on the RR overpass with the Rep "plumbers" and instantly released
by the Texas mounted police. Then the false attack scenario was carried
out by LBJ in 1964 with the Gulf Of Tonkin incident that everyone agrees was
faked by him to get us into Viet Nam where JFK had just announced that ALL
Americans would be removed from VN by xmas 1963. LBJ managed to kill some
55,000 innocent Americans there in a hopeless civil war intervention that
had nothing to do with the spread of communism.

LBJ tried it again in 1967 in "conspiracy" with our "allies" in Israel with
the USS Liberty off the coast of Egypt which was to inflame Americans into
supporting a war against Egypt. The attempt was a failure only because of
the complete incompetancy of our "allies" in Israel who were simply unable
to sink the unarmed and unarmored converted Liberty ship.

And speaking of asses, Mr Rottenberg who has apparently been secretly
tracking me as part of a conspiracy, would you like to add something here?

"rottenberg" wrote in message
om...
ShoarmaBoy wrote in message
. 34...
This is true for normal military aircraft where they use it already.
But i don't think this is going to be inserted in real life boeing
737NG's
or other commercial airliners because this also is a system that can be
hijacked. If they break into the control room. Also than you should be
able to hack the system if it's a remote system to be able to be
controled
from the ground...
Never thought of that?

Tom
(Boeing 737NG command officer)


Let's not forget that it also requires fewer men - instead of breaking
into three cockpits, you can break into one control room for three
planes (and likly nore planes than that). That's the sort of logical
gap that obviously eluded Blue, along with his devoted acceptance of
conspiracy theories that at least border on libel.



  #34  
Old September 5th 04, 07:52 PM
rottenberg
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

"Blue" wrote in message ...
My, my. this thread just won't die! And now I have a hated adversary to
boot.


"Hated adversary" – isn't that a bit grandiose, I mean even compared
to your prior conspiracy ravings? I guess then you can't pigeonhole
those who disagree with you as a bunch of reactionaries looking for
hated enemies.

On topic, I have been on top of the World Trade Center and was surprised by
the many planes in the air surrounding it. The planes would have to have
been flown by a following plane. Also, the Pennslyvania plane was followed
by an unmarked Gulfstream jet such as Cheney uses.


This is so weird. I remember being on top of the WTC also once and
also noticing lots of airplanes looking really close. Okay that was
about 25 years ago. But then, in 1996-98 I was working at 40 Wall
Street, only a few blocks away from WTC, and I saw what looked like a
lot of low-flying planes again. I even saw one that looked exactly
like one of the airplanes that flew into the towers – same two wings,
two engines, even the exact same markings (silver body, red & blue
stripes). WTF, if NYC wasn't close to a major commercial aviation
corridor, I'd go completely bonkers!!

Oh, and what do you mean that the "planes would have to have been
flown by a following plane"? How do we know that the Pennsylvania
plane was followed by a Gulfstream? And what difference does that
make anyway? Speilberg is supposed to use a Gulfstream. Lots of rich
types have Gulfstreams. Sid Lumet used a Gulfstream in "Sabrina" –
now are we gonna blame Julia Ormond for 9/11?

Also, when JFK took over the CIA presented him with a plan eerily like the
one used for 911 including a plane switch of a CIA lookalike for a civilian
plane which would be remotely flown over Cuba and destroyed there to incite
American lemmings into supporting a war with little guy Cuba who had just
kicked George Bush SR's ass with his hair-brained Bay of Pigs invasion .


More theories? I'm not even sure what sense that makes – a plane
exploding over Cuba to incite Americans? Why would a plane exploding
over Cuba get Americans to support a war against Cuba? Maybe you
meant to say a Cuban plane to fly past Cuba and explode in Miami.
That's more plausible – but is there any proof or even any evidence
that the CIA actually had such an idea? Even if they had, what does
that really prove? The idea of crashing planes into buildings or
ships or fabricating acts of military aggression isn't an original
idea. I've been flying Cessnas on PCs since 1987, routinely trying to
fly between the towers on MS Flight Simulator. Sometimes I did it
right, sometimes I didn't. (although I stopped after 9/11) I now
suppose you'll accuse me of working "for the company". In any event,
the idea that we were waiting for the right spark and had to fake one
is nonsense – when the Soviets missiled Cuba up in '62, the point was
to prevent war at all costs, including an invasion of Cuba.

JFK , crossed him up by refusing to support the mess. To the plan for a
false downing of an American passenger jet he did the unthinkable, he sent
RFK to the military chest beaters where he announced: " My big brother says
for you guys to stick your kill Cuber plans up your asses."


That's funny, I would have assumed that he'd send McNamara, the guy he
actually kept around to run the military.

There had been several of them. (or words to that effect.)


The effect being to make RFK sound like a man who spoke English as a
second langugae. I mean seriously....

The principal operator there, Bush Sr, not only didn't forgive that he was
arrested on the RR overpass with the Rep "plumbers" and instantly released
by the Texas mounted police. Then the false attack scenario was carried
out by LBJ in 1964 with the Gulf Of Tonkin incident that everyone agrees was
faked by him to get us into Viet Nam where JFK had just announced that ALL
Americans would be removed from VN by xmas 1963. LBJ managed to kill some
55,000 innocent Americans there in a hopeless civil war intervention that
had nothing to do with the spread of communism.


So now it's LBJ? I thought it was the CIA or Bush Sr.? McNamara
stood by LBJ when it came to pushing the Tonkin incident as one of
preemptive attack by North VN, and near unanimity by a US congress
sealed the deal. Where's the CIA? This is the problem I have with
conspiracy theorists - basically a conspiracy theory gives you no
tools to fight against the evil they purport to reveal - they only
tell you who to hate and why. Arabs, Jews, Liberals, conservatives,
LBJ, RFK etc. At least a decent conspiracy theorist can do a better
job of it. I thought this was about the CIA, then against Bush - now
its against another president, from the other party, who ran on a
different agenda. Just who are you talking about here?

LBJ tried it again in 1967 in "conspiracy" with our "allies" in Israel with
the USS Liberty off the coast of Egypt which was to inflame Americans into
supporting a war against Egypt. The attempt was a failure only because of
the complete incompetancy of our "allies" in Israel who were simply unable
to sink the unarmed and unarmored converted Liberty ship.


Incompetency of the Israelis? Needed to inflame support for Israel?
I must be an idiot – the Liberty incident has been one of the
thorniest issues of Israeli-American relations, yet one the Israelis
claimed to have carried out in fact. I've neevr seen any indication
that they ever tried to fob the attack on the Egyptians. Perhaps they
hit the Liberty because they feared the Americans would leak intel to
the other side by accident (or deliberately as was done in the
Iran-Iraq war). But a frame-up? Never. Even if the Israelis,
(AFAIK, never took out a target like a ship) sunk the Liberty and
convinced the world that the Isreali-marked planes and ships used in
the attack were actually Egyptian – what would be the point? Israel
wasn't South VN. LBJ didn't have to bottle up the Suez with carrier
battle groups, or commit hundreds of thousands of troops. There was
no need to manipulate world opinion, let alone American opinion that
was desperate enough to risk the ire of American by killing Americans.
For their faults, Israeli forces were not ARVN. It took little to
drum up sympathy for one nation surrounded by Soviet aligned enemies,
and the support the Israelis needed could have been done covertly – so
why the idea of subterfuge, in a plan that could have wrecked Israel's
standing with America and the rest of the world? And what sort of
support would the Israelis have gotten had they pulled it off and
shifted blame to the Egyptians (they have since accepted the blame,
though to what degree is admittedly debateable, as is the sufficiency
of redress)? The very next year saw the capture and brutal treatment
of the crew of the Pueblo. @0 years later saw the attack against the
Stark. Yet The Pueblos seizure saw no new war against DPRK, and
relations with Iraq remained stable until the invasion of Kuwait,
years after the Stark.

And speaking of asses, Mr Rottenberg who has apparently been secretly
tracking me as part of a conspiracy, would you like to add something here?


I didn't say anything about asses. I think we can safely say that
this thread has degenerated into...

Oh ****, what the hell.

Yeah – you got me. The above is just a load of bull****. It turns
out that I'm really the acting DDCI of the NSA. I'm the guy
responsible for keeping you conspiracy theorists busy by releasing
useless and meaningless documents with strategic redactions. Life is
boring here in Area-51, and playing mind-tag with you guys is the only
entertainment we get, aside from making alien babes take off their
clothes and dancing for us, then dissecting them the morning after.
The problem is that we all have our deep-dark secrets. Mine actually
stemmed from my role as the undisclosed producer for a movie called
"Hangar 18" with Robert Vaughn. You may remember "Hangar 18" as that
flick which made it uncool to believe in Alien conspiracies. It was
actually intended to preempt a more plausible picture starring Roy
Scheider and Gene Hackman, and make it so uncool that it would take
decades before anybody could bring any semblance of respectability to
the UFO-conspiracy community. Here's a quick flash for you "six
degrees of Kevin Bacon" people out there – yeah I know most of you
were happy enough to Link Robert Vaughn to Christopher Lee ("Starship
Invasions"), and Lee to Sean Astin (LotR) who was in "Whitewater
Summer" with Bacon; It turns out that one of the alien corpses was
actually none other than Mark Metcalf, that's right, Lt. Niedermayer
himself from "Animal House". During the autopsy scene, one the
scientists are supposed to get into this long philosophical discussion
about the advanced alien species, and I was pretty lazy when it came
to scripting this scene (I figured they could ad-lib there way through
it) so it took forever to get. It was like on the 9th take, and
Metcalf is starting to get really ****ed off. So this female
scientist is saying something like "why have they crossed the gulf of
space to set foot on our world?" What profound message have they
brought for mankind?" (See why it took forever to shoot this scene?
The cast and crew laughed themselves silly – we were going to hire
some telekenitics from Honduras so they could run the cameras without
being in the same room, and also because they we didn't think they
could laugh if they couldn't understand the dialog.) Anyway,
brilliant-but-sensitive female scientist (who cried whenever the rest
of us laughed at her) goes into her bit about the profound alien
message thing, ans crews it up..again. I yell "cut" and Metcalf jumps
off this slab-thing that he's on and goes totally postal (and this was
before we even knew what that meant). "YOU WANT A MESSAGE? YOU WANT
A ****ING MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED ****ING CIVILIZATION!?!? HERE'S
YOUR ****ING MESSAGE: YOU'RE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK!!! NOW DROP DOWN
AND GIVE ME ****ING 20!!!" Anyway the female scientist is floored,
and we're laughing so hard, we don't notice that she's having this
total break down right there in front of us. We found out years later
that she got on "Dynasty" based on her ability to loser her mind, a
talent we believe she perfected on our set. So I guess her story had
a happy ending, until Dynasty was cancelled, the story was sad again.

Anyway, the problem was that we couldn't come up with a good ending.
Scientists find the aliens, and politicians don't want anything found.
The ending had to be plausible enough so that UFO conspiracy
theorists would think that they could convince Americans as to its
truth, yet too stupid for anybody to really believe. Nobody thought
it possible, and it turns out that it wasn't. What we didn't
understand at the time, was that conspiracy theorists can
believe/doubt anything they want. But we still wanted a good ending.
So there I was, on the "red eye" Jennifer 737 out of Groom Lake,
heading out to Vegas, hoping free drinks on the strip would loosen me
up. I hadn't a case writer's block this bad since I script-doctored
for Hal Holbrook in "Capricorn One" earlier that year. You know what
the brilliance of "Capricorn One" was – we hired Hal Holbrook. This
guy could ad-lib in ****ing Shakespeare; he could out ad-lib Mamet,
and this was before anybody even knew who Mamet was. Kris Kraft
doesn't even give the guy a script – just tells him what point he
wants Holbrook to get across. Remember "Capricorn One" - it was this
edgy movie about how Holbrook fakes this mission to mars that James
Brolin, OJ and that guy from "Law & Order" were supposed to fly.
Kraft asks him to give this speech to James Brolin and OJ Simpson
about how tired America is of the space race, and that nobody thought
the dream was worth the cost. We weren't expecting anything major,
and Kraft didn't even stay on the set to watch it (he gave us some
bull**** excuse joke about that he had to run and sabotage a Soviet
launch – man that Kraft was such a crack-up; Goldin was nowhere near
as funny; you ever wonder why the "Law & Order" guy is so much
snappier in this movie than he is on that show? Kris Kraft!!). So
Holbrook gets the idea for this speech, and goes ballistic. We think
he's mad at us, but then we realize he;s in character, so we keep the
cameras rolling. "The program costs too much? The ****ing program
costs too much!?! **** you assholes – you don't know what a dream
costs!!" and he garnishes it with this great anecdote about Apollo 17,
how when networks preempted a re-run of "Lucy" for the -17 landing,
people complained "I could understand if it was a new episode, but
this was a re-run!!" Anyway, there I am on this Jennifer 737 nursing
a Harley's Bristol Cream when I notice this guy across the aisle
giving me the eye. Then I remembered that kid we brought in to add a
dash of realism to the alien autopsy sequence for "Hangar-18" (here
was a guy who knew what a blown apart bodylooked like on any planet;
I think he was also a consultant on "Quincy"). I hadn't even met the
guy, but everybody knew Osama Bin Laden by reputation. Now, since it
was my decision to bring the guy back from Afghanistan, I figured I
owed the guy a well-done. Turns out the guy is fascinating, and funny
as hell. After Jennifer sets down, we spend the next 18 hours
schmoozing at the airport bar. How cool was he? We had to be the only
guys in Vegas paying for their own drinks – that's how hard it was to
get out of that bar. Then we come to my problem. At this, a moment
of silence, then he looks off at this fully loaded Eastern 727 and
asks me what would happen if that plane came down anything but softly,
and anywhere but a runway. And I go that it would cause two things –
boom & yauch!! More to the point, why would an airplane just happen
to "land" on Hangar-18? He shakes his head – obviously I had missed
the point. He reminds me that, engaging the Soviets, he studied the
history of their hardware, and reminded me of the 1973 Paris air show,
where the Tupolev SST disintegrated in the air, but not high enough to
avoid killing anybody on the ground. The point is that people were
killed on the ground because they were near a huge agglomeration of
airplanes. He was surprised that stuff like this didn't happen more
often. And it didn't have to be next to an airport – just nearby. I
don't remember if airlines had deregulated by then, but the point was
that air traffic was expected to sky rocket in the next few years – no
matter how far away you were from an airport (even a moderately sized
one) – you'd have a dozen jumbos daisy-wheeling over your house. But
even before then, Hangar-18 itself was on an air force base – it was a
****ing hangar for crissakes (okay, so maybe Osama didn't say
"crissakes", but the rest of what he said was…err.. to that effect).
So I get out of that bar and head on the next Jennifer flight out.
Problem solved – but I had to get out of Vegas, or the idea would just
die. And Vegas could wait, I mean, the MGM Grand wasn't just going to
****ing vanish, was it? So there it was – Robert Vaughn decides to
destroy Hangar-18 by crashing an airplane into it. Airplanes crash
all the time, and sometimes they even crash on airports – says one of
my characters. 1980 comes and goes, the film is a flop, The
Scheider/Hackman movie never comes together, Spielberg totally
re-writes "E.T." to omit more than the bare display of the government
in action on UFO's (and any suggestion that it was covert). In other
words, mission accomplished.

A few years down the line, the Russians start dropping rulers like
flies. Something big is in the offing, some of us even start to
question whether the Soviets are gonna last to see the 75th
anniversary of the revolution. Problem is that they talk tough – and
because of that, the administration starts talking about stripping
civilian intel to pay for a six hundred ship fleet, and for a bunch of
new wings of airplanes, some of which didn't even exist yet.
Remembering my shmooze with OBL, I head out to Langley one day and
give the boss what I know. The next war will rely on "unconventional
warfare" – by which I meant terrorism but enhanced. We already knew
that terrorists liked to hijack planes, and that they also knew liked
to drive semtex-loaded vans into things. We also knew that we could
engineer a spectacular air disaster (we had that botched controlled
crash of the Boeing 720 on film). So if hijackers liked to blow
things up, why did they go to so much trouble to keep from blowing up
airplanes they hijacked. Were they afraid that people would give in
to their demands before they had a chance to blow up the planes? Were
they afraid of losing a cause to fight for? Airline crews are like
bank tellers – both are (were) trained to be very cooperative in
emergency situations. So why were hijackers so careful about the
planes they hijacked? Simply combining the idea of a suicide hijack
was part of that American impulse to synthesize and create – the same
spirit of invention that created high-concept movies and peanutbutter
cups. Not to say that I thought it represented an American virtue to
actually carry out the attack, onviously it was an evil thing to do.
Only that it felt great that I could conceive such a thing possible,
and perhaps forestall it. So I gave my pitch to Casey, and he was not
enthused. He did give me the benefit of the doubt – was this an
attack that might be carried out against the Russians (by which he
meant – was this something we should do?) or a "canned goods" plan (by
which he meant, an attack we'd carry out against ourselves and frame
others for.)? I told him that I thought this was neither – an attack
that might actually be made against us by bona-fide enemies. Here he
lost it – what enemies? The Reds had 180 divisions against us, and
god knew how many nuclear-equipped aircraft. Who would believe the
Reds would do something like that when they've got firepower against
us. I guessed that he was thinking I meant a simulated attack against
us), so I reiterated that this would be a genuine attack, by genuine
enemies, but he discounted this as well. In The Company, we broke the
enemies down to several groups – liberal media, the Soviets and their
backers, and the so-called the "Maverick enzyme" (allies in name who
would backstab us). Due to jurisdictional constraints, drug cartels
were deliberately excluded.) There wasn't going to be an attack,
simulated or actual. Terrorists liked to hit us on foreign soil, and
let the media have its way with us at home (they had jurisdictional
constraints of their own). The Russians don't need terrorism –
they've got 180 ****ing divisions. Man, I didn't know that an old guy
could yell "****ing!!" like that, but Casey did – no wonder he was
DCI. The Russisns wouldn't need to hit us as long as they were as
strong as they were, and that wouldn't change for a century. Even if,
by some miracle, the WarPac just evaporated, who would hit us on our
own soil? The last person who would try that would be some stateless
organization (again, interpreting my plan as being one undertaken by
us to frame others), and a third world country would never want to
consider giving us the right to go in and completely kick their asses.
We didn't even go into Cuba after Angola or Grenda. A major attack
like the one I considered would be nuts for another country to
undertake – they had us by the balls wherever our flag flew
(embassies, garrisons, ports), they'd never need to hit us on our
soil. Even stateless organizations like ones we backed in Afghanistan
kept things "far from home" (AFAIK, he was right on this one – I
couldn't think of a single op Bin Laden took on definite Russian or
just plain Soviet soil). The disappearance of the Soviets wouldn't
make it any more feasible or likely that such an op would go forward –
now we wouldn't have the Russians breathing down our necks. I tried
playing a trump card by combining the two circumstances that Casey had
considered in isolation – what if the Soviets disappeared and we
wanted to undertake such a mission to justify some US military ops.
Casey looked at me long and hard, then he asked me against what sort
of people we'd be framing for the mass murder of maybe a couple
hundred Americans. I knew that we wouldn't be framing a single
country – there have to be easier and cheaper ways to mobilize
America, like the threat of harm (always scarier than the harm
itself), the possibility that its weapons aren't as 3rd world as their
plumbing, or simply the idea that they were arab. In our circles, the
arabs were always "soft sell". Instead, I went with the idea that a
huge, yet shadowy organization, tied to no single country, with
operations everywhere and operatives from anywhere. That way, we
could justify going everywhere. At this, Casey turned beet red – I
thought his head was gonna fly off. But he kept his voice cool. "Mr.
Rottenberg (and he didn't even put the accent on "rotten" like
everybody else does) the point of covert operations of the sort you
describe wouldn't give us the license to invade anywhere we liked, it
would pretty much nail us to the wall unless we hit every country on
the planet, and no matter what country we hit, there would always be
some joker running around saying we'd hit the wrong one. We'd be tied
down with our soldiers getting "Montezuma's Revenge" in **** holes no
one cares about, and don't matter that much to our global interests.
Where are the resources supposed to come from, Mr. Rottenberg. Oh
that's right, the Soviets are gonna vanish. Okay, Soviets are gonna
vanish, and we're gonna find ourselves with a ton of free troops and
toys ready to go wherever we want them to. Oh, except that once those
Soviets vanish, you're gonna have a ton of crazy congressman thinking
that we can save money by cutting troop levels. Even if we turned
this into some multi-national chase for guys with fake passports and
wire cutters, nobody would be able to justify the spending needed to
keep our forces to the same level we do today [again, this was during
the cold war]. We could dredge up those horror stories about the
"Islamic Bomb" but that wouldn't require the sort of mass-murder you
suggest, and if we ever decided that we wanted (or needed) to
concentrate our forces against any one nation, we'd be stuck, because
we'd by then committed ourselves to a war against guys who aren't part
of any nation." The problem with stateless organizations is that they
aren't really all that stateless – if they don't have the majority of
the populace and the government in their pockets, they've got the
right ministers ready to do their bidding and the craven remainder of
the government who's afraid to question them. Yet, despite the camps,
the refuge and the other forms of open and enthusiastic support, we
dare not go against these sovereign backers of the stateless because
the rest of the world claims them as innocent. Surprisingly, I agree.
I'm big on the idea that not everybody must receive their punishment
in this world – a higher plane and a higher power are more effective
for revealing sin and inflicting the just reward for it.
Nevertheless, as Mr. Casey adroitly put it (now playing with the
"rotten" to wild abandon) no idiot would dream up the idea of a
stateless enemy if they could avoid it, when doing so would create a
large, insulated class of terrorist sympathizers. It was impossible
to shake him of this idea, especially since he was devoted to the idea
that the Russians were forever.

Year later, after the wall fell, and Casey fell, and 9/11 fell, I gave
the CIA my goodbyes, and hoped to strike it rich in Hollywood like
such famed Company vets as John Demme, David Lynch and both "Spikes"
(Lee & Jonze). However, I was to find my dreams dashed by the men
whose experience on "Hangar 18" I made a living hell. "Ad lib this,
you stupid ****ing rotten-moron!!" Spielberg yelled. Now Steve is the
main man in tinsel town – and how do I go against that firepower. For
the second time in my life, the conspirator has to wonder, how does he
survive the conniving of others?

Yeah – you got me. The above is just a load of bull****. It turns
out that I'm really the acting DDCI of the NSA. I'm the guy
responsible for keeping you conspiracy theorists busy by releasing
useless and meaningless documents with strategic redactions. Life is
boring here in Area-51, and playing mind-tag with you guys is the only
entertainment we get, aside from making alien babes take off their
clothes and dancing for us, then dissecting them the morning after.
The problem is that we all have our deep-dark secrets. Mine actually
stemmed from my role is as the undisclosed producer for a movie called
"Hangar 18" with Robert Vaughn. You may remember "Hangar 18" as that
flick which made it uncool to believe in Alien conspiracies. It was
actually intended to preempt a more plausible picture starring Roy
Scheider and Gene Hackman, and make it so uncool that it would take
decades before anybody could bring any semblance of respectability to
the UFO-conspiracy community. Here's a quick flash for you "six
degrees of Kevin Bacon" people out there – yeah I know most of you
were happy enough to Link Robert Vaughn to Christopher Lee ("Starship
Invasions"), and Lee to Sean Astin (LotR) who was in "Whitewater
Summer" with Bacon; It turns out that one of the alien corpses was
actually none other than Mark Metcalf, that's right, Lt. Niedermayer
himself from "Animal House". During the autopsy scene, one the
scientists are supposed to get into this long philosophical discussion
about the advanced alien species, and I was pretty lazy when it came
to scripting this scene (I figured they could ad-lib there way through
it) so it took forever to get. It was like on the 9th take, and
Metcalf is starting to get really ****ed off. So this female
scientist is saying something like "why have they crossed the gulf of
space to set foot on our world?"
What profound message have they brought for mankind?" (See why it
took forever to shoot this scene? The cast and crew laughed
themselves silly – we were going to hire some telekenitics from
Honduras so they could run the cameras without being in the same room,
and also because they we didn't think they could laugh if they
couldn't understand the dialog.) Anyway, brilliant-but-sensitive
female scientist (who cried whenever the rest of us laughed at her)
goes into her bit about the profound alien message thing, and Metcalf
jumps off this slab-thing that he's on and goes totally postal (and
this was before we even knew what the phrase meant). "YOU WANT A
MESSAGE? YOU WANT A ****ING MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED ****ING
CIVILIZATION!?!? HERE'S YOUR ****ING MESSAGE: YOU'RE ALL WORTHLESS
AND WEAK!!! NOW DROP DOWN AND GIVE ME ****ING 20!!!" Anyway the
female scientist is floored, and we're laughing so hard, we don't
notice that she's having this total seizure right there in front of
us. We found out years later that she got on "Dynasty" based on her
ability to loser her mind, a talent we believe she perfected on our
set. So I guess her story had a happy ending, until Dynasty was
cancelled, the story was sad again.

Anyway, the problem was that we couldn't come up with a good ending.
Scientists find the aliens, and politicians don't want anything found.
The ending had to be plausible enough so that UFO conspiracy
theorists would think that they could convince Americans as to its
truth, yet too stupid for anybody to really believe. Nobody thought
it possible, and it turns out that it wasn't. What we didn't
understand at the time, was that conspiracy theorists can
believe/doubt anything they want. But we still wanted a good ending.
So there I was, on the "red eye" Jennifer 737 out of Groom Lake,
heading out to Vegas, hoping free drinks on the strip would loosen me
up. I hadn't a case writer's block since I script doctored for Hal
Holbrook in "Capricorn One" earlier that year. You know what the
brilliance of "Capricorn One" was – we hired Hal Holbrook. This guy
could ad-lib in ****ing Shakespeare; he could out ad-lib Mamet, and
this was before anybody even knew who Mamet was. Kris Kraft doesn't
even give the guy a script – just tells him what point he wants
Holbrook to get across. Kraft asks him to give this speech to James
Brolin and OJ Simpson about how tired America is of the space race,
and that nobody thought the dream was worth the cost. We weren't
expecting anything major, and Kraft didn't even stay on the set to
watch it (he gave us some bull**** excuse joke about that he had to
run and sabotage a Soviet launch – man that Kraft was such a crack-up;
Goldin was nowhere near as funny). So Holbrook gets the idea for this
speech, and goes ballistic – "The program costs too much? The ****ing
program costs too much!?! **** you assholes – you don't know what a
dream costs!!" and he garnioshes it with this great anecdote about
Apollo 17, how when they preempted a re-run of "Lucy" for the landing,
people complained "I could understand if it was a new episode, but
this was a re-run!!" Anyway, there I am on this flight nursing a
Harley's Bristol Cream when I notice this guy across the aisle giving
me the eye. Then I remembered that kid we brought in to add a dash of
realism to the alien autopsy sequence for "Hangar-18". I hadn't even
met the guy, but everybody knew Osama Bin Laden by reputation. Now,
since it was my decision to bring the guy back from Afghanistan, I
figured I owed the guy a well-done. Turns out the guy is fascinating.
After Jennifer sets down, we spend the next 18 hours schmoozing at
the airport bar. How cool was he? We had to be the only guys in Vegas
paying for their own drinks – that's how hard it was to get out of
that bar. Then we come to my problem. At this, a moment of silence,
then he looks off at this fully loaded Eastern 727 and asks me what
would happen if that plane came down anything but softly, and anywhere
but a runway. And I go that it would cause two things – boom &
yauch!! More to the point, why would an airplane just happen to
"land" on Hangar-18? He shakes his head – obviously I had missed the
point. He reminds me that, engaging the Soviets, he studied the
history of their hardware, and reminded me of the 1973 Paris air show,
where the Tupolev SST disintegrated in the air, but not high enough to
avoid killing anybody on the ground. The point is that people were
killed on the ground because they were near a huge agglomeration of
airplanes. He was surprised that stuff like this didn't happen more
often. And it didn't have to be next to an airport – just nearby. I
don't remember if airlines had deregulated by then, but the point was
that air traffic was expected to sky rocket in the next few years – no
matter how far away you were from an airport (even a moderately sized
one) – you'd have a dozen jumbos daisy-wheeling over your house. But
even before then, Hangar-18 itself was on an air force base – it was a
****ing hangar for crissakes (okay, so maybe Osama didn't say
"crissakes", but the rest of what he said was…err.. to that effect).
So I get out of that bar and head on the next Jennifer flight out.
Problem solved – but I had to get out of Vegas, or the idea would just
die. And Vegas could wait, I mean, the MGM Grand wasn't just going to
****ing vanish, was it? So there it was – Robert Vaughn decides to
destroy Hangar-18 by crashing an airplane into it. Airplanes crash
all the time, and sometimes they even crash on airports – says one of
my characters. 1980 comes and goes, the film is a flop, The
Scheider/Hackman movie never comes together, Spielberg totally
re-writes "E.T." to omit more than the bare display of the government
in action on UFO's (and any suggestion that it was covert). In other
words, mission accomplished.

A few years down the line, the Russians start dropping rulers like
flies. Something big is in the offing, some of us even start to
question whether the Soviets are gonna last to see the 75th
anniversary of the revolution. Problem is that they talk tough – and
because of that, the administration starts talking about stripping
civilian intel to pay for a six hundred ship fleet, and for a bunch of
new wings of airplanes, some of which didn't even exist yet.
Remembering my shmooze with OBL, I head out to Langley one day and
give the boss what I know. The next war will rely on "unconventional
warfare" – by which I meant terrorism but enhanced. We already knew
that terrorists liked to hijack planes, and that they also knew liked
to drive semtex-loaded vans into things. We also knew that we could
engineer a spectacular air disaster (we had that botched controlled
crash of the Boeing 720 on film). So if hijackers liked to blow
things up, why did they go to so much trouble to keep from blowing up
airplanes they hijacked. Were they afraid that people would give in
to their demands before they had a chance to blow up the planes? Were
they afraid of losing a cause to fight for? Airline crews are like
bank tellers – both are (were) trained to be very cooperative in
emergency situations. So why were hijackers so careful about the
planes they hijacked? Simply combining the idea of a suicide hijack
was part of that American impulse to synthesize and create – the same
spirit of invention that created high-concept movies and peanutbutter
cups. Not to say that I thought it represented an American virtue to
actually carry out the attack, onviously it was an evil thing to do.
Only that it felt great that I could conceive such a thing possible,
and perhaps forestall it. So I gave my pitch to Casey, and he was not
enthused. He did give me the benefit of the doubt – was this an
attack that might be carried out against the Russians (by which he
meant – was this something we should do?) or a "canned goods" plan (by
which he meant, an attack we'd carry out against ourselves and frame
others for.)? I told him that I thought this was neither – an attack
that might actually be made against us by bona-fide enemies. Here he
lost it – what enemies? The Reds had 180 divisions against us, and
god knew how many nuclear-equipped aircraft. Who would believe the
Reds would do something like that when they've got firepower against
us. I guessed that he was thinking I meant a simulated attack against
us), so I reiterated that this would be a genuine attack, by genuine
enemies, but he discounted this as well. In The Company, we broke the
enemies down to several groups – liberal media, the Soviets and their
backers, and the so-called the "Maverick enzyme" (allies in name who
would backstab us). Due to jurisdictional constraints, drug cartels
were deliberately excluded.) There wasn't going to be an attack,
simulated or actual. Terrorists liked to hit us on foreign soil, and
let the media have its way with us at home (they had jurisdictional
constraints of their own). The Russians don't need terrorism –
they've got 180 ****ing divisions. Man, I didn't know that an old guy
could yell "****ing!!" like that, but Casey did – no wonder he was
DCI. The Russisns wouldn't need to hit us as long as they were as
strong as they were, and that wouldn't change for a century. Even if,
by some miracle, the WarPac just evaporated, who would hit us on our
own soil? The last person who would try that would be some stateless
organization (again, interpreting my plan as being one undertaken by
us to frame others), and a third world country would never want to
consider giving us the right to go in and completely kick their asses.
We didn't even go into Cuba after Angola or Grenda. A major attack
like the one I considered would be nuts for another country to
undertake – they had us by the balls wherever our flag flew
(embassies, garrisons, ports), they'd never need to hit us on our
soil. Even stateless organizations like ones we backed in Afghanistan
kept things "far from home" (AFAIK, he was right on this one – I
couldn't think of a single op Bin Laden took on definite Russian or
just plain Soviet soil). The disappearance of the Soviets wouldn't
make it any more feasible or likely that such an op would go forward –
now we wouldn't have the Russians breathing down our necks. I tried
playing a trump card by combining the two circumstances that Casey had
considered in isolation – what if the Soviets disappeared and we
wanted to undertake such a mission to justify some US military ops.
Casey looked at me long and hard, then he asked me against what sort
of people we'd be framing for the mass murder of maybe a couple
hundred Americans. I knew that we wouldn't be framing a single
country – there have to be easier and cheaper ways to mobilize
America, like the threat of harm (always scarier than the harm
itself), the possibility that its weapons aren't as 3rd world as their
plumbing, or simply the idea that they were arab. In our circles, the
arabs were always "soft sell". Instead, I went with the idea that a
huge, yet shadowy organization, tied to no single country, with
operations everywhere and operatives from anywhere. That way, we
could justify going everywhere. At this, Casey turned beet red – I
thought his head was gonna fly off. But he kept his voice cool. "Mr.
Rottenberg (and he didn't even put the accent on "rotten" like
everybody else does) the point of covert operations of the sort you
describe wouldn't give us the license to invade anywhere we liked, it
would pretty much nail us to the wall unless we hit every country on
the planet, and no matter what country we hit, there would always be
some joker running around saying we'd hit the wrong one. We'd be tied
down with our soldiers getting "Montezuma's Revenge" in **** holes no
one cares about, and don't matter that much to our global interests.
Where are the resources supposed to come from, Mr. Rottenberg. Oh
that's right, the Soviets are gonna vanish. Okay, Soviets are gonna
vanish, and we're gonna find ourselves with a ton of free troops and
toys ready to go wherever we want them to. Oh, except that once those
Soviets vanish, you're gonna have a ton of crazy congressman thinking
that we can save money by cutting troop levels. Even if we turned
this into some multi-national chase for guys with fake passports and
wire cutters, nobody would be able to justify the spending needed to
keep our forces to the same level we do today [again, this was during
the cold war]. We could dredge up those horror stories about the
"Islamic Bomb" but that wouldn't require the sort of mass-murder you
suggest, and if we ever decided that we wanted (or needed) to
concentrate our forces against any one nation, we'd be stuck, because
we'd by then committed ourselves to a war against guys who aren't part
of any nation." The problem with stateless organizations is that they
aren't really all that stateless – if they don't have the majority of
the populace and the government in their pockets, they've got the
right ministers ready to do their bidding and the craven remainder of
the government who's afraid to question them. Yet, despite the camps,
the refuge and the other forms of open and enthusiastic support, we
dare not go against these sovereign backers of the stateless because
the rest of the world claims them as innocent. Surprisingly, I agree.
I'm big on the idea that not everybody must receive their punishment
in this world – a higher plane and a higher power are more effective
for revealing sin and inflicting the just reward for it.
Nevertheless, as Mr. Casey adroitly put it (now playing with the
"rotten" to wild abandon) no idiot would dream up the idea of a
stateless enemy if they could avoid it, when doing so would create a
large, insulated class of terrorist sympathizers. It was impossible
to shake him of this idea, especially since he was devoted to the idea
that the Russians were forever.

Year later, after the wall fell, and Casey fell, and 9/11 fell, I gave
the CIA my goodbyes, and hoped to strike it rich in Hollywood like
such famed Company vets as John Demme, David Lynch and both "Spikes"
(Lee & Jonze). However, I was to find my dreams dashed by the men
whose experience on "Hangar 18" I made a living hell. "Ad lib this,
you stupid ****ing rotten-moron!!" Spielberg yelled. Now Steve is the
main man in tinsel town – and how do I go against that firepower. For
the second time in my life, the conspirator has to wonder, how does he
survive the conniving of others?

"rottenberg" wrote in message
om...
ShoarmaBoy wrote in message
. 34...
This is true for normal military aircraft where they use it already.
But i don't think this is going to be inserted in real life boeing
737NG's
or other commercial airliners because this also is a system that can be
hijacked. If they break into the control room. Also than you should be
able to hack the system if it's a remote system to be able to be
controled
from the ground...
Never thought of that?

Tom
(Boeing 737NG command officer)


Let's not forget that it also requires fewer men - instead of breaking
into three cockpits, you can break into one control room for three
planes (and likly nore planes than that). That's the sort of logical
gap that obviously eluded Blue, along with his devoted acceptance of
conspiracy theories that at least border on libel.

  #35  
Old September 6th 04, 01:55 AM
Jay Williams
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

ROFL...

You know this is going to wind up getting sent all over the internet as
proof of the "conspiracy"... You ought to go ahead and send a copy to
snopes.com so they can get ahead of the game! grin

"rottenberg" wrote in message
om...
"Blue" wrote in message

...
My, my. this thread just won't die! And now I have a hated adversary

to
boot.


"Hated adversary" - isn't that a bit grandiose, I mean even compared
to your prior conspiracy ravings? I guess then you can't pigeonhole
those who disagree with you as a bunch of reactionaries looking for
hated enemies.

On topic, I have been on top of the World Trade Center and was surprised

by
the many planes in the air surrounding it. The planes would have to

have
been flown by a following plane. Also, the Pennslyvania plane was

followed
by an unmarked Gulfstream jet such as Cheney uses.


This is so weird. I remember being on top of the WTC also once and
also noticing lots of airplanes looking really close. Okay that was
about 25 years ago. But then, in 1996-98 I was working at 40 Wall
Street, only a few blocks away from WTC, and I saw what looked like a
lot of low-flying planes again. I even saw one that looked exactly
like one of the airplanes that flew into the towers - same two wings,
two engines, even the exact same markings (silver body, red & blue
stripes). WTF, if NYC wasn't close to a major commercial aviation
corridor, I'd go completely bonkers!!

Oh, and what do you mean that the "planes would have to have been
flown by a following plane"? How do we know that the Pennsylvania
plane was followed by a Gulfstream? And what difference does that
make anyway? Speilberg is supposed to use a Gulfstream. Lots of rich
types have Gulfstreams. Sid Lumet used a Gulfstream in "Sabrina" -
now are we gonna blame Julia Ormond for 9/11?

Also, when JFK took over the CIA presented him with a plan eerily like

the
one used for 911 including a plane switch of a CIA lookalike for a

civilian
plane which would be remotely flown over Cuba and destroyed there to

incite
American lemmings into supporting a war with little guy Cuba who had

just
kicked George Bush SR's ass with his hair-brained Bay of Pigs invasion .


More theories? I'm not even sure what sense that makes - a plane
exploding over Cuba to incite Americans? Why would a plane exploding
over Cuba get Americans to support a war against Cuba? Maybe you
meant to say a Cuban plane to fly past Cuba and explode in Miami.
That's more plausible - but is there any proof or even any evidence
that the CIA actually had such an idea? Even if they had, what does
that really prove? The idea of crashing planes into buildings or
ships or fabricating acts of military aggression isn't an original
idea. I've been flying Cessnas on PCs since 1987, routinely trying to
fly between the towers on MS Flight Simulator. Sometimes I did it
right, sometimes I didn't. (although I stopped after 9/11) I now
suppose you'll accuse me of working "for the company". In any event,
the idea that we were waiting for the right spark and had to fake one
is nonsense - when the Soviets missiled Cuba up in '62, the point was
to prevent war at all costs, including an invasion of Cuba.

JFK , crossed him up by refusing to support the mess. To the plan for

a
false downing of an American passenger jet he did the unthinkable, he

sent
RFK to the military chest beaters where he announced: " My big brother

says
for you guys to stick your kill Cuber plans up your asses."


That's funny, I would have assumed that he'd send McNamara, the guy he
actually kept around to run the military.

There had been several of them. (or words to that effect.)


The effect being to make RFK sound like a man who spoke English as a
second langugae. I mean seriously....

The principal operator there, Bush Sr, not only didn't forgive that he

was
arrested on the RR overpass with the Rep "plumbers" and instantly

released
by the Texas mounted police. Then the false attack scenario was

carried
out by LBJ in 1964 with the Gulf Of Tonkin incident that everyone agrees

was
faked by him to get us into Viet Nam where JFK had just announced that

ALL
Americans would be removed from VN by xmas 1963. LBJ managed to kill

some
55,000 innocent Americans there in a hopeless civil war intervention

that
had nothing to do with the spread of communism.


So now it's LBJ? I thought it was the CIA or Bush Sr.? McNamara
stood by LBJ when it came to pushing the Tonkin incident as one of
preemptive attack by North VN, and near unanimity by a US congress
sealed the deal. Where's the CIA? This is the problem I have with
conspiracy theorists - basically a conspiracy theory gives you no
tools to fight against the evil they purport to reveal - they only
tell you who to hate and why. Arabs, Jews, Liberals, conservatives,
LBJ, RFK etc. At least a decent conspiracy theorist can do a better
job of it. I thought this was about the CIA, then against Bush - now
its against another president, from the other party, who ran on a
different agenda. Just who are you talking about here?

LBJ tried it again in 1967 in "conspiracy" with our "allies" in Israel

with
the USS Liberty off the coast of Egypt which was to inflame Americans

into
supporting a war against Egypt. The attempt was a failure only because

of
the complete incompetancy of our "allies" in Israel who were simply

unable
to sink the unarmed and unarmored converted Liberty ship.


Incompetency of the Israelis? Needed to inflame support for Israel?
I must be an idiot - the Liberty incident has been one of the
thorniest issues of Israeli-American relations, yet one the Israelis
claimed to have carried out in fact. I've neevr seen any indication
that they ever tried to fob the attack on the Egyptians. Perhaps they
hit the Liberty because they feared the Americans would leak intel to
the other side by accident (or deliberately as was done in the
Iran-Iraq war). But a frame-up? Never. Even if the Israelis,
(AFAIK, never took out a target like a ship) sunk the Liberty and
convinced the world that the Isreali-marked planes and ships used in
the attack were actually Egyptian - what would be the point? Israel
wasn't South VN. LBJ didn't have to bottle up the Suez with carrier
battle groups, or commit hundreds of thousands of troops. There was
no need to manipulate world opinion, let alone American opinion that
was desperate enough to risk the ire of American by killing Americans.
For their faults, Israeli forces were not ARVN. It took little to
drum up sympathy for one nation surrounded by Soviet aligned enemies,
and the support the Israelis needed could have been done covertly - so
why the idea of subterfuge, in a plan that could have wrecked Israel's
standing with America and the rest of the world? And what sort of
support would the Israelis have gotten had they pulled it off and
shifted blame to the Egyptians (they have since accepted the blame,
though to what degree is admittedly debateable, as is the sufficiency
of redress)? The very next year saw the capture and brutal treatment
of the crew of the Pueblo. @0 years later saw the attack against the
Stark. Yet The Pueblos seizure saw no new war against DPRK, and
relations with Iraq remained stable until the invasion of Kuwait,
years after the Stark.

And speaking of asses, Mr Rottenberg who has apparently been secretly
tracking me as part of a conspiracy, would you like to add something

here?

I didn't say anything about asses. I think we can safely say that
this thread has degenerated into...

Oh ****, what the hell.

Yeah - you got me. The above is just a load of bull****. It turns
out that I'm really the acting DDCI of the NSA. I'm the guy
responsible for keeping you conspiracy theorists busy by releasing
useless and meaningless documents with strategic redactions. Life is
boring here in Area-51, and playing mind-tag with you guys is the only
entertainment we get, aside from making alien babes take off their
clothes and dancing for us, then dissecting them the morning after.
The problem is that we all have our deep-dark secrets. Mine actually
stemmed from my role as the undisclosed producer for a movie called
"Hangar 18" with Robert Vaughn. You may remember "Hangar 18" as that
flick which made it uncool to believe in Alien conspiracies. It was
actually intended to preempt a more plausible picture starring Roy
Scheider and Gene Hackman, and make it so uncool that it would take
decades before anybody could bring any semblance of respectability to
the UFO-conspiracy community. Here's a quick flash for you "six
degrees of Kevin Bacon" people out there - yeah I know most of you
were happy enough to Link Robert Vaughn to Christopher Lee ("Starship
Invasions"), and Lee to Sean Astin (LotR) who was in "Whitewater
Summer" with Bacon; It turns out that one of the alien corpses was
actually none other than Mark Metcalf, that's right, Lt. Niedermayer
himself from "Animal House". During the autopsy scene, one the
scientists are supposed to get into this long philosophical discussion
about the advanced alien species, and I was pretty lazy when it came
to scripting this scene (I figured they could ad-lib there way through
it) so it took forever to get. It was like on the 9th take, and
Metcalf is starting to get really ****ed off. So this female
scientist is saying something like "why have they crossed the gulf of
space to set foot on our world?" What profound message have they
brought for mankind?" (See why it took forever to shoot this scene?
The cast and crew laughed themselves silly - we were going to hire
some telekenitics from Honduras so they could run the cameras without
being in the same room, and also because they we didn't think they
could laugh if they couldn't understand the dialog.) Anyway,
brilliant-but-sensitive female scientist (who cried whenever the rest
of us laughed at her) goes into her bit about the profound alien
message thing, ans crews it up..again. I yell "cut" and Metcalf jumps
off this slab-thing that he's on and goes totally postal (and this was
before we even knew what that meant). "YOU WANT A MESSAGE? YOU WANT
A ****ING MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED ****ING CIVILIZATION!?!? HERE'S
YOUR ****ING MESSAGE: YOU'RE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK!!! NOW DROP DOWN
AND GIVE ME ****ING 20!!!" Anyway the female scientist is floored,
and we're laughing so hard, we don't notice that she's having this
total break down right there in front of us. We found out years later
that she got on "Dynasty" based on her ability to loser her mind, a
talent we believe she perfected on our set. So I guess her story had
a happy ending, until Dynasty was cancelled, the story was sad again.

Anyway, the problem was that we couldn't come up with a good ending.
Scientists find the aliens, and politicians don't want anything found.
The ending had to be plausible enough so that UFO conspiracy
theorists would think that they could convince Americans as to its
truth, yet too stupid for anybody to really believe. Nobody thought
it possible, and it turns out that it wasn't. What we didn't
understand at the time, was that conspiracy theorists can
believe/doubt anything they want. But we still wanted a good ending.
So there I was, on the "red eye" Jennifer 737 out of Groom Lake,
heading out to Vegas, hoping free drinks on the strip would loosen me
up. I hadn't a case writer's block this bad since I script-doctored
for Hal Holbrook in "Capricorn One" earlier that year. You know what
the brilliance of "Capricorn One" was - we hired Hal Holbrook. This
guy could ad-lib in ****ing Shakespeare; he could out ad-lib Mamet,
and this was before anybody even knew who Mamet was. Kris Kraft
doesn't even give the guy a script - just tells him what point he
wants Holbrook to get across. Remember "Capricorn One" - it was this
edgy movie about how Holbrook fakes this mission to mars that James
Brolin, OJ and that guy from "Law & Order" were supposed to fly.
Kraft asks him to give this speech to James Brolin and OJ Simpson
about how tired America is of the space race, and that nobody thought
the dream was worth the cost. We weren't expecting anything major,
and Kraft didn't even stay on the set to watch it (he gave us some
bull**** excuse joke about that he had to run and sabotage a Soviet
launch - man that Kraft was such a crack-up; Goldin was nowhere near
as funny; you ever wonder why the "Law & Order" guy is so much
snappier in this movie than he is on that show? Kris Kraft!!). So
Holbrook gets the idea for this speech, and goes ballistic. We think
he's mad at us, but then we realize he;s in character, so we keep the
cameras rolling. "The program costs too much? The ****ing program
costs too much!?! **** you assholes - you don't know what a dream
costs!!" and he garnishes it with this great anecdote about Apollo 17,
how when networks preempted a re-run of "Lucy" for the -17 landing,
people complained "I could understand if it was a new episode, but
this was a re-run!!" Anyway, there I am on this Jennifer 737 nursing
a Harley's Bristol Cream when I notice this guy across the aisle
giving me the eye. Then I remembered that kid we brought in to add a
dash of realism to the alien autopsy sequence for "Hangar-18" (here
was a guy who knew what a blown apart bodylooked like on any planet;
I think he was also a consultant on "Quincy"). I hadn't even met the
guy, but everybody knew Osama Bin Laden by reputation. Now, since it
was my decision to bring the guy back from Afghanistan, I figured I
owed the guy a well-done. Turns out the guy is fascinating, and funny
as hell. After Jennifer sets down, we spend the next 18 hours
schmoozing at the airport bar. How cool was he? We had to be the only
guys in Vegas paying for their own drinks - that's how hard it was to
get out of that bar. Then we come to my problem. At this, a moment
of silence, then he looks off at this fully loaded Eastern 727 and
asks me what would happen if that plane came down anything but softly,
and anywhere but a runway. And I go that it would cause two things -
boom & yauch!! More to the point, why would an airplane just happen
to "land" on Hangar-18? He shakes his head - obviously I had missed
the point. He reminds me that, engaging the Soviets, he studied the
history of their hardware, and reminded me of the 1973 Paris air show,
where the Tupolev SST disintegrated in the air, but not high enough to
avoid killing anybody on the ground. The point is that people were
killed on the ground because they were near a huge agglomeration of
airplanes. He was surprised that stuff like this didn't happen more
often. And it didn't have to be next to an airport - just nearby. I
don't remember if airlines had deregulated by then, but the point was
that air traffic was expected to sky rocket in the next few years - no
matter how far away you were from an airport (even a moderately sized
one) - you'd have a dozen jumbos daisy-wheeling over your house. But
even before then, Hangar-18 itself was on an air force base - it was a
****ing hangar for crissakes (okay, so maybe Osama didn't say
"crissakes", but the rest of what he said was.err.. to that effect).
So I get out of that bar and head on the next Jennifer flight out.
Problem solved - but I had to get out of Vegas, or the idea would just
die. And Vegas could wait, I mean, the MGM Grand wasn't just going to
****ing vanish, was it? So there it was - Robert Vaughn decides to
destroy Hangar-18 by crashing an airplane into it. Airplanes crash
all the time, and sometimes they even crash on airports - says one of
my characters. 1980 comes and goes, the film is a flop, The
Scheider/Hackman movie never comes together, Spielberg totally
re-writes "E.T." to omit more than the bare display of the government
in action on UFO's (and any suggestion that it was covert). In other
words, mission accomplished.

A few years down the line, the Russians start dropping rulers like
flies. Something big is in the offing, some of us even start to
question whether the Soviets are gonna last to see the 75th
anniversary of the revolution. Problem is that they talk tough - and
because of that, the administration starts talking about stripping
civilian intel to pay for a six hundred ship fleet, and for a bunch of
new wings of airplanes, some of which didn't even exist yet.
Remembering my shmooze with OBL, I head out to Langley one day and
give the boss what I know. The next war will rely on "unconventional
warfare" - by which I meant terrorism but enhanced. We already knew
that terrorists liked to hijack planes, and that they also knew liked
to drive semtex-loaded vans into things. We also knew that we could
engineer a spectacular air disaster (we had that botched controlled
crash of the Boeing 720 on film). So if hijackers liked to blow
things up, why did they go to so much trouble to keep from blowing up
airplanes they hijacked. Were they afraid that people would give in
to their demands before they had a chance to blow up the planes? Were
they afraid of losing a cause to fight for? Airline crews are like
bank tellers - both are (were) trained to be very cooperative in
emergency situations. So why were hijackers so careful about the
planes they hijacked? Simply combining the idea of a suicide hijack
was part of that American impulse to synthesize and create - the same
spirit of invention that created high-concept movies and peanutbutter
cups. Not to say that I thought it represented an American virtue to
actually carry out the attack, onviously it was an evil thing to do.
Only that it felt great that I could conceive such a thing possible,
and perhaps forestall it. So I gave my pitch to Casey, and he was not
enthused. He did give me the benefit of the doubt - was this an
attack that might be carried out against the Russians (by which he
meant - was this something we should do?) or a "canned goods" plan (by
which he meant, an attack we'd carry out against ourselves and frame
others for.)? I told him that I thought this was neither - an attack
that might actually be made against us by bona-fide enemies. Here he
lost it - what enemies? The Reds had 180 divisions against us, and
god knew how many nuclear-equipped aircraft. Who would believe the
Reds would do something like that when they've got firepower against
us. I guessed that he was thinking I meant a simulated attack against
us), so I reiterated that this would be a genuine attack, by genuine
enemies, but he discounted this as well. In The Company, we broke the
enemies down to several groups - liberal media, the Soviets and their
backers, and the so-called the "Maverick enzyme" (allies in name who
would backstab us). Due to jurisdictional constraints, drug cartels
were deliberately excluded.) There wasn't going to be an attack,
simulated or actual. Terrorists liked to hit us on foreign soil, and
let the media have its way with us at home (they had jurisdictional
constraints of their own). The Russians don't need terrorism -
they've got 180 ****ing divisions. Man, I didn't know that an old guy
could yell "****ing!!" like that, but Casey did - no wonder he was
DCI. The Russisns wouldn't need to hit us as long as they were as
strong as they were, and that wouldn't change for a century. Even if,
by some miracle, the WarPac just evaporated, who would hit us on our
own soil? The last person who would try that would be some stateless
organization (again, interpreting my plan as being one undertaken by
us to frame others), and a third world country would never want to
consider giving us the right to go in and completely kick their asses.
We didn't even go into Cuba after Angola or Grenda. A major attack
like the one I considered would be nuts for another country to
undertake - they had us by the balls wherever our flag flew
(embassies, garrisons, ports), they'd never need to hit us on our
soil. Even stateless organizations like ones we backed in Afghanistan
kept things "far from home" (AFAIK, he was right on this one - I
couldn't think of a single op Bin Laden took on definite Russian or
just plain Soviet soil). The disappearance of the Soviets wouldn't
make it any more feasible or likely that such an op would go forward -
now we wouldn't have the Russians breathing down our necks. I tried
playing a trump card by combining the two circumstances that Casey had
considered in isolation - what if the Soviets disappeared and we
wanted to undertake such a mission to justify some US military ops.
Casey looked at me long and hard, then he asked me against what sort
of people we'd be framing for the mass murder of maybe a couple
hundred Americans. I knew that we wouldn't be framing a single
country - there have to be easier and cheaper ways to mobilize
America, like the threat of harm (always scarier than the harm
itself), the possibility that its weapons aren't as 3rd world as their
plumbing, or simply the idea that they were arab. In our circles, the
arabs were always "soft sell". Instead, I went with the idea that a
huge, yet shadowy organization, tied to no single country, with
operations everywhere and operatives from anywhere. That way, we
could justify going everywhere. At this, Casey turned beet red - I
thought his head was gonna fly off. But he kept his voice cool. "Mr.
Rottenberg (and he didn't even put the accent on "rotten" like
everybody else does) the point of covert operations of the sort you
describe wouldn't give us the license to invade anywhere we liked, it
would pretty much nail us to the wall unless we hit every country on
the planet, and no matter what country we hit, there would always be
some joker running around saying we'd hit the wrong one. We'd be tied
down with our soldiers getting "Montezuma's Revenge" in **** holes no
one cares about, and don't matter that much to our global interests.
Where are the resources supposed to come from, Mr. Rottenberg. Oh
that's right, the Soviets are gonna vanish. Okay, Soviets are gonna
vanish, and we're gonna find ourselves with a ton of free troops and
toys ready to go wherever we want them to. Oh, except that once those
Soviets vanish, you're gonna have a ton of crazy congressman thinking
that we can save money by cutting troop levels. Even if we turned
this into some multi-national chase for guys with fake passports and
wire cutters, nobody would be able to justify the spending needed to
keep our forces to the same level we do today [again, this was during
the cold war]. We could dredge up those horror stories about the
"Islamic Bomb" but that wouldn't require the sort of mass-murder you
suggest, and if we ever decided that we wanted (or needed) to
concentrate our forces against any one nation, we'd be stuck, because
we'd by then committed ourselves to a war against guys who aren't part
of any nation." The problem with stateless organizations is that they
aren't really all that stateless - if they don't have the majority of
the populace and the government in their pockets, they've got the
right ministers ready to do their bidding and the craven remainder of
the government who's afraid to question them. Yet, despite the camps,
the refuge and the other forms of open and enthusiastic support, we
dare not go against these sovereign backers of the stateless because
the rest of the world claims them as innocent. Surprisingly, I agree.
I'm big on the idea that not everybody must receive their punishment
in this world - a higher plane and a higher power are more effective
for revealing sin and inflicting the just reward for it.
Nevertheless, as Mr. Casey adroitly put it (now playing with the
"rotten" to wild abandon) no idiot would dream up the idea of a
stateless enemy if they could avoid it, when doing so would create a
large, insulated class of terrorist sympathizers. It was impossible
to shake him of this idea, especially since he was devoted to the idea
that the Russians were forever.

Year later, after the wall fell, and Casey fell, and 9/11 fell, I gave
the CIA my goodbyes, and hoped to strike it rich in Hollywood like
such famed Company vets as John Demme, David Lynch and both "Spikes"
(Lee & Jonze). However, I was to find my dreams dashed by the men
whose experience on "Hangar 18" I made a living hell. "Ad lib this,
you stupid ****ing rotten-moron!!" Spielberg yelled. Now Steve is the
main man in tinsel town - and how do I go against that firepower. For
the second time in my life, the conspirator has to wonder, how does he
survive the conniving of others?

Yeah - you got me. The above is just a load of bull****. It turns
out that I'm really the acting DDCI of the NSA. I'm the guy
responsible for keeping you conspiracy theorists busy by releasing
useless and meaningless documents with strategic redactions. Life is
boring here in Area-51, and playing mind-tag with you guys is the only
entertainment we get, aside from making alien babes take off their
clothes and dancing for us, then dissecting them the morning after.
The problem is that we all have our deep-dark secrets. Mine actually
stemmed from my role is as the undisclosed producer for a movie called
"Hangar 18" with Robert Vaughn. You may remember "Hangar 18" as that
flick which made it uncool to believe in Alien conspiracies. It was
actually intended to preempt a more plausible picture starring Roy
Scheider and Gene Hackman, and make it so uncool that it would take
decades before anybody could bring any semblance of respectability to
the UFO-conspiracy community. Here's a quick flash for you "six
degrees of Kevin Bacon" people out there - yeah I know most of you
were happy enough to Link Robert Vaughn to Christopher Lee ("Starship
Invasions"), and Lee to Sean Astin (LotR) who was in "Whitewater
Summer" with Bacon; It turns out that one of the alien corpses was
actually none other than Mark Metcalf, that's right, Lt. Niedermayer
himself from "Animal House". During the autopsy scene, one the
scientists are supposed to get into this long philosophical discussion
about the advanced alien species, and I was pretty lazy when it came
to scripting this scene (I figured they could ad-lib there way through
it) so it took forever to get. It was like on the 9th take, and
Metcalf is starting to get really ****ed off. So this female
scientist is saying something like "why have they crossed the gulf of
space to set foot on our world?"
What profound message have they brought for mankind?" (See why it
took forever to shoot this scene? The cast and crew laughed
themselves silly - we were going to hire some telekenitics from
Honduras so they could run the cameras without being in the same room,
and also because they we didn't think they could laugh if they
couldn't understand the dialog.) Anyway, brilliant-but-sensitive
female scientist (who cried whenever the rest of us laughed at her)
goes into her bit about the profound alien message thing, and Metcalf
jumps off this slab-thing that he's on and goes totally postal (and
this was before we even knew what the phrase meant). "YOU WANT A
MESSAGE? YOU WANT A ****ING MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED ****ING
CIVILIZATION!?!? HERE'S YOUR ****ING MESSAGE: YOU'RE ALL WORTHLESS
AND WEAK!!! NOW DROP DOWN AND GIVE ME ****ING 20!!!" Anyway the
female scientist is floored, and we're laughing so hard, we don't
notice that she's having this total seizure right there in front of
us. We found out years later that she got on "Dynasty" based on her
ability to loser her mind, a talent we believe she perfected on our
set. So I guess her story had a happy ending, until Dynasty was
cancelled, the story was sad again.

Anyway, the problem was that we couldn't come up with a good ending.
Scientists find the aliens, and politicians don't want anything found.
The ending had to be plausible enough so that UFO conspiracy
theorists would think that they could convince Americans as to its
truth, yet too stupid for anybody to really believe. Nobody thought
it possible, and it turns out that it wasn't. What we didn't
understand at the time, was that conspiracy theorists can
believe/doubt anything they want. But we still wanted a good ending.
So there I was, on the "red eye" Jennifer 737 out of Groom Lake,
heading out to Vegas, hoping free drinks on the strip would loosen me
up. I hadn't a case writer's block since I script doctored for Hal
Holbrook in "Capricorn One" earlier that year. You know what the
brilliance of "Capricorn One" was - we hired Hal Holbrook. This guy
could ad-lib in ****ing Shakespeare; he could out ad-lib Mamet, and
this was before anybody even knew who Mamet was. Kris Kraft doesn't
even give the guy a script - just tells him what point he wants
Holbrook to get across. Kraft asks him to give this speech to James
Brolin and OJ Simpson about how tired America is of the space race,
and that nobody thought the dream was worth the cost. We weren't
expecting anything major, and Kraft didn't even stay on the set to
watch it (he gave us some bull**** excuse joke about that he had to
run and sabotage a Soviet launch - man that Kraft was such a crack-up;
Goldin was nowhere near as funny). So Holbrook gets the idea for this
speech, and goes ballistic - "The program costs too much? The ****ing
program costs too much!?! **** you assholes - you don't know what a
dream costs!!" and he garnioshes it with this great anecdote about
Apollo 17, how when they preempted a re-run of "Lucy" for the landing,
people complained "I could understand if it was a new episode, but
this was a re-run!!" Anyway, there I am on this flight nursing a
Harley's Bristol Cream when I notice this guy across the aisle giving
me the eye. Then I remembered that kid we brought in to add a dash of
realism to the alien autopsy sequence for "Hangar-18". I hadn't even
met the guy, but everybody knew Osama Bin Laden by reputation. Now,
since it was my decision to bring the guy back from Afghanistan, I
figured I owed the guy a well-done. Turns out the guy is fascinating.
After Jennifer sets down, we spend the next 18 hours schmoozing at
the airport bar. How cool was he? We had to be the only guys in Vegas
paying for their own drinks - that's how hard it was to get out of
that bar. Then we come to my problem. At this, a moment of silence,
then he looks off at this fully loaded Eastern 727 and asks me what
would happen if that plane came down anything but softly, and anywhere
but a runway. And I go that it would cause two things - boom &
yauch!! More to the point, why would an airplane just happen to
"land" on Hangar-18? He shakes his head - obviously I had missed the
point. He reminds me that, engaging the Soviets, he studied the
history of their hardware, and reminded me of the 1973 Paris air show,
where the Tupolev SST disintegrated in the air, but not high enough to
avoid killing anybody on the ground. The point is that people were
killed on the ground because they were near a huge agglomeration of
airplanes. He was surprised that stuff like this didn't happen more
often. And it didn't have to be next to an airport - just nearby. I
don't remember if airlines had deregulated by then, but the point was
that air traffic was expected to sky rocket in the next few years - no
matter how far away you were from an airport (even a moderately sized
one) - you'd have a dozen jumbos daisy-wheeling over your house. But
even before then, Hangar-18 itself was on an air force base - it was a
****ing hangar for crissakes (okay, so maybe Osama didn't say
"crissakes", but the rest of what he said was.err.. to that effect).
So I get out of that bar and head on the next Jennifer flight out.
Problem solved - but I had to get out of Vegas, or the idea would just
die. And Vegas could wait, I mean, the MGM Grand wasn't just going to
****ing vanish, was it? So there it was - Robert Vaughn decides to
destroy Hangar-18 by crashing an airplane into it. Airplanes crash
all the time, and sometimes they even crash on airports - says one of
my characters. 1980 comes and goes, the film is a flop, The
Scheider/Hackman movie never comes together, Spielberg totally
re-writes "E.T." to omit more than the bare display of the government
in action on UFO's (and any suggestion that it was covert). In other
words, mission accomplished.

A few years down the line, the Russians start dropping rulers like
flies. Something big is in the offing, some of us even start to
question whether the Soviets are gonna last to see the 75th
anniversary of the revolution. Problem is that they talk tough - and
because of that, the administration starts talking about stripping
civilian intel to pay for a six hundred ship fleet, and for a bunch of
new wings of airplanes, some of which didn't even exist yet.
Remembering my shmooze with OBL, I head out to Langley one day and
give the boss what I know. The next war will rely on "unconventional
warfare" - by which I meant terrorism but enhanced. We already knew
that terrorists liked to hijack planes, and that they also knew liked
to drive semtex-loaded vans into things. We also knew that we could
engineer a spectacular air disaster (we had that botched controlled
crash of the Boeing 720 on film). So if hijackers liked to blow
things up, why did they go to so much trouble to keep from blowing up
airplanes they hijacked. Were they afraid that people would give in
to their demands before they had a chance to blow up the planes? Were
they afraid of losing a cause to fight for? Airline crews are like
bank tellers - both are (were) trained to be very cooperative in
emergency situations. So why were hijackers so careful about the
planes they hijacked? Simply combining the idea of a suicide hijack
was part of that American impulse to synthesize and create - the same
spirit of invention that created high-concept movies and peanutbutter
cups. Not to say that I thought it represented an American virtue to
actually carry out the attack, onviously it was an evil thing to do.
Only that it felt great that I could conceive such a thing possible,
and perhaps forestall it. So I gave my pitch to Casey, and he was not
enthused. He did give me the benefit of the doubt - was this an
attack that might be carried out against the Russians (by which he
meant - was this something we should do?) or a "canned goods" plan (by
which he meant, an attack we'd carry out against ourselves and frame
others for.)? I told him that I thought this was neither - an attack
that might actually be made against us by bona-fide enemies. Here he
lost it - what enemies? The Reds had 180 divisions against us, and
god knew how many nuclear-equipped aircraft. Who would believe the
Reds would do something like that when they've got firepower against
us. I guessed that he was thinking I meant a simulated attack against
us), so I reiterated that this would be a genuine attack, by genuine
enemies, but he discounted this as well. In The Company, we broke the
enemies down to several groups - liberal media, the Soviets and their
backers, and the so-called the "Maverick enzyme" (allies in name who
would backstab us). Due to jurisdictional constraints, drug cartels
were deliberately excluded.) There wasn't going to be an attack,
simulated or actual. Terrorists liked to hit us on foreign soil, and
let the media have its way with us at home (they had jurisdictional
constraints of their own). The Russians don't need terrorism -
they've got 180 ****ing divisions. Man, I didn't know that an old guy
could yell "****ing!!" like that, but Casey did - no wonder he was
DCI. The Russisns wouldn't need to hit us as long as they were as
strong as they were, and that wouldn't change for a century. Even if,
by some miracle, the WarPac just evaporated, who would hit us on our
own soil? The last person who would try that would be some stateless
organization (again, interpreting my plan as being one undertaken by
us to frame others), and a third world country would never want to
consider giving us the right to go in and completely kick their asses.
We didn't even go into Cuba after Angola or Grenda. A major attack
like the one I considered would be nuts for another country to
undertake - they had us by the balls wherever our flag flew
(embassies, garrisons, ports), they'd never need to hit us on our
soil. Even stateless organizations like ones we backed in Afghanistan
kept things "far from home" (AFAIK, he was right on this one - I
couldn't think of a single op Bin Laden took on definite Russian or
just plain Soviet soil). The disappearance of the Soviets wouldn't
make it any more feasible or likely that such an op would go forward -
now we wouldn't have the Russians breathing down our necks. I tried
playing a trump card by combining the two circumstances that Casey had
considered in isolation - what if the Soviets disappeared and we
wanted to undertake such a mission to justify some US military ops.
Casey looked at me long and hard, then he asked me against what sort
of people we'd be framing for the mass murder of maybe a couple
hundred Americans. I knew that we wouldn't be framing a single
country - there have to be easier and cheaper ways to mobilize
America, like the threat of harm (always scarier than the harm
itself), the possibility that its weapons aren't as 3rd world as their
plumbing, or simply the idea that they were arab. In our circles, the
arabs were always "soft sell". Instead, I went with the idea that a
huge, yet shadowy organization, tied to no single country, with
operations everywhere and operatives from anywhere. That way, we
could justify going everywhere. At this, Casey turned beet red - I
thought his head was gonna fly off. But he kept his voice cool. "Mr.
Rottenberg (and he didn't even put the accent on "rotten" like
everybody else does) the point of covert operations of the sort you
describe wouldn't give us the license to invade anywhere we liked, it
would pretty much nail us to the wall unless we hit every country on
the planet, and no matter what country we hit, there would always be
some joker running around saying we'd hit the wrong one. We'd be tied
down with our soldiers getting "Montezuma's Revenge" in **** holes no
one cares about, and don't matter that much to our global interests.
Where are the resources supposed to come from, Mr. Rottenberg. Oh
that's right, the Soviets are gonna vanish. Okay, Soviets are gonna
vanish, and we're gonna find ourselves with a ton of free troops and
toys ready to go wherever we want them to. Oh, except that once those
Soviets vanish, you're gonna have a ton of crazy congressman thinking
that we can save money by cutting troop levels. Even if we turned
this into some multi-national chase for guys with fake passports and
wire cutters, nobody would be able to justify the spending needed to
keep our forces to the same level we do today [again, this was during
the cold war]. We could dredge up those horror stories about the
"Islamic Bomb" but that wouldn't require the sort of mass-murder you
suggest, and if we ever decided that we wanted (or needed) to
concentrate our forces against any one nation, we'd be stuck, because
we'd by then committed ourselves to a war against guys who aren't part
of any nation." The problem with stateless organizations is that they
aren't really all that stateless - if they don't have the majority of
the populace and the government in their pockets, they've got the
right ministers ready to do their bidding and the craven remainder of
the government who's afraid to question them. Yet, despite the camps,
the refuge and the other forms of open and enthusiastic support, we
dare not go against these sovereign backers of the stateless because
the rest of the world claims them as innocent. Surprisingly, I agree.
I'm big on the idea that not everybody must receive their punishment
in this world - a higher plane and a higher power are more effective
for revealing sin and inflicting the just reward for it.
Nevertheless, as Mr. Casey adroitly put it (now playing with the
"rotten" to wild abandon) no idiot would dream up the idea of a
stateless enemy if they could avoid it, when doing so would create a
large, insulated class of terrorist sympathizers. It was impossible
to shake him of this idea, especially since he was devoted to the idea
that the Russians were forever.

Year later, after the wall fell, and Casey fell, and 9/11 fell, I gave
the CIA my goodbyes, and hoped to strike it rich in Hollywood like
such famed Company vets as John Demme, David Lynch and both "Spikes"
(Lee & Jonze). However, I was to find my dreams dashed by the men
whose experience on "Hangar 18" I made a living hell. "Ad lib this,
you stupid ****ing rotten-moron!!" Spielberg yelled. Now Steve is the
main man in tinsel town - and how do I go against that firepower. For
the second time in my life, the conspirator has to wonder, how does he
survive the conniving of others?

"rottenberg" wrote in message
om...
ShoarmaBoy wrote in message
. 34...
This is true for normal military aircraft where they use it already.
But i don't think this is going to be inserted in real life boeing
737NG's
or other commercial airliners because this also is a system that can

be
hijacked. If they break into the control room. Also than you should

be
able to hack the system if it's a remote system to be able to be
controled
from the ground...
Never thought of that?

Tom
(Boeing 737NG command officer)

Let's not forget that it also requires fewer men - instead of breaking
into three cockpits, you can break into one control room for three
planes (and likly nore planes than that). That's the sort of logical
gap that obviously eluded Blue, along with his devoted acceptance of
conspiracy theories that at least border on libel.




 




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