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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Was Senator Paul Wellstone's death murder? Patrick Smith looks at the "evidence."
Nov 14, 2002 | Almost every high-profile airplane crash, it seems, is trailed by a conspiracy theory of one sort or another. It's hard to say which is the most notorious, since these speculations stretch back to the death of Dag Hammarskjöld (he really was murdered) and the heyday of the Bermuda Triangle.
The TWA 800 disaster, at least in my years following the business, is probably the most mulled-over crash in the minds of, shall we say, the intellectually eccentric. But I've even heard suggestions that the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, which went down in the Atlantic three years ago after takeoff from JFK, was intended to be a 9/11-style suicide flight, thwarted at the last minute by a crew member. "The plane," one man writes, recounting some completely fallacious report he'd read somewhere (the Net, do you think?), "had actually turned back toward New York."
The crash of a United Airlines 737 at Colorado Springs in 1991, long since attributed to a rudder malfunction, was purported by many (including many pilots) to be a murder-suicide involving the captain and first officer. According to the bogus story, the two were a feuding husband and wife who'd been paired together for the trip. Somebody whipped out an axe and ... you get the idea.
More recently, the mongers are speculating that last November's crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in New York was the result of a bombing and coverup. The evidence, the theory asserts, was squelched by a government eager to avoid further crisis, those still-smoldering World Trade Center ruins just a few miles away. While it's not inconceivable, I don't give much credence to the idea. My hunch, in line with the investigation thus far, is that the vertical stabilizer (tail) was torn loose when an undetected crack in its composite construction was further stressed by the combination of wake turbulence from a 747 and, possibly, an accidental overuse of rudder by the crew.
Some of my brethren will not be eager to embrace the most likely explanations, which are understandably disheartening: 1) the spontaneous (more or less) structural failure of an airplane and 2) a fellow pilot making a bad situation worse. There's an element of denial here, if you ask me.
After TWA 800 many pilots chimed in with "Come on, airplane fuel tanks don't simply explode." Except sometimes, if extremely rarely, they do, and Flight 800 is one of at least two documented cases. With AA 587, it's "Tails don't simply snap off!" Except, again, under certain and albeit very unusual circumstances, they will.
Interestingly, and perhaps as a testament to just how profligate our imaginations can get, there's even a kind of reverse conspiracy Web site devoted to the notion that Pan Am 103 was blown up over Lockerbie not by a terrorist's stash of Semtex, but from the effects of a burst cargo door.
And now, in an electronic forum near you, enter the unfortunate Paul Wellstone. Message boards are bringing up suggestions that the crash of Sen. Wellstone's plane was suspicious. This was, I suppose, inevitable from the day of the crash, but the postings and otherwise electronically circulating insinuations I've seen -- some delivered with more conviction than others -- are chiefly the work of people with a grade-school knowledge of airplanes and little understanding of the dynamics of crashes.
Or else, of course, the writers are fully aware of their lack of expertise and merely trying to manipulate people with impressive-sounding balderdash (imagine that: politically motivated misinformation).
One posting says that the fuselage of Wellstone's plane should not have "burst into flames" upon impact, as reported, because it had separated from the wings beforehand. If fuel is carried in the wings, doesn't this make some sense?
In critiquing the above example, let's begin by mentioning that fuel is sometimes stored in the fuselage as well as the wings. We'd need to know the placement of tanks in the model of aircraft involved. Further, "burst into flames" isn't exactly an unambiguous account. And if the wings did separate before impact, at which point along their length and integral fuel tanks did this break occur? And where did they come to rest, relative to the rest of the wreckage?
And so on. Questions like these are for the National Transportation Safety Board, and the submitted evidence is dubious at best.
