Details are unclear at this time, but an American Airlines’ Boeing 737-800 plane split in two, overrunning the runway at Jamaica’s Norman Manley International Airport, in Kingston. One of the passengers’ description is frightening.
It would have been the first dedicated satellite for the study of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Instead, a failure during launch has scuttled NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory in the Pacific near Antarctica.
How do you transport a downed but still intact jet from its landing place to a salvage yard? By going through New Jersey. (Note: instructions only valid if Jet crashed in lower 48.) [Jalopnik]
The BBC commissioned a flight-sim reproduction of the last week’s near-miraculous US Airways incident. So, in case you were wondering, this is what it looks like to pilot a commercial jet onto a river.
This Takumi calculator is a perfect metaphor of life: Its layout looks like a puzzle and when you try to solve any problem, it crashes at random. Can’t get any better than that for $US60. Unless it spontaneously bursts in flames. [Idea Frames via Technabob]
newVideoPlayer("/mysterybomb_giz.flv", 448, 272,""); The US government plotted to hide the fact that they were constantly flying nuclear-armed B-52 bombers over Greenland during the 1960s, the BBC has discovered in a recent investigation. The operation, called Chrome Dome, was designed to instantly respond to the Soviet Union if the latter launched a nuclear missile attack against Thule, a US Air Force base strategically placed near the North Pole. The Pentagon believed that this could potentially start a full-scale thermonuclear war, so they kept the birds in the sky at all times as a deterrent against Moscow. It was a “good” plan, until one of them crashed on January 21 1968.
After a hiker found some of Fossett’s ID documents in eastern California while on a trail in the Sierra Nevadas, a search team has found what looks to be the wreckage of the record-breaking pilot’s single-engine Bellanca plane. Fossett, who became the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon among other feats, took off for a quick leisure flight in September of last year and never came back. He was declared legally deceased in February by his family, and now, finally a bit more closure. [Reuters]
These photos, taken from a Flickr set, show what appears to be some sort of crashed spacecraft in London’s Potters Field. They offer no explanation as to what’s going on over there across the pond. Do any of you know what this is? Movie shoot? Publicity stunt? Photoshoppery? Actual alien invasion? Let’s hear your guesses, both educated and uneducated, in the comments. Update: It’s an ad for a new car. Boo.
Joe Pappalardo got some crisp, high quality military close-ups of the Spirit of Kansas, the US$1.2 billion stealth B-2 bomber that crashed in Guam last February. We published other images of the crash scene before (because we like to see a billion dollars burning), but all the mess was cleaned up then. Here you can see the carnage right after it happened, including Air Force personnel trying to deactivate explosives in the ejected pilot seats:
What do you do with a C-130 cargo aircraft that has made a crash-landing in an insecure area of Iraq? If you’re the 447th Expeditionary Operations Support Squadron you wire it with explosives and you blow it up. Again and again and again… until it’s in small enough bits to load onto a flatbed and ship back to an air base. Apparently it’s pretty rare for an aircraft to make emergency landings in the field, which is good news. Though if it resulted in more videos like this, we wouldn’t complain. [PointNiner via Danger Room]
