Germanwings crash: Not the full story?

Joe Quinn
Sott.net

When I heard about the crash of Germanwings Flight GWI9525 in the French Alps on the morning of March 24th, I was shocked, but to be honest, not that shocked. It's not that I expected it to happen, but this was the fifth such incident in the last year. If that frequency is maintained, the statistically-very-low chances of meeting an untimely end on a commercial flight will have to be recalculated.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash I, like many others around the world, waited patiently for the details. What could possibly cause a modern, albeit a little aged, first-generation Airbus A320 to suddenly drop out of the sky and slam into a mountain side? I had a few theories, among them the incapacitating effects of an 'EMP' from an exploding overhead space rock. The shocking rise in fireball/meteorite sightings over the past 10 years makes this plausible, and might well have been the cause of the crash of AF447 into the Pacific ocean in 2009. But I waited, and I expected to wait because investigations of this sort can, and should, take quite a while to complete.

When dealing with airplane crashes, the most important information, even more important than the cockpit voice recordings, is the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) or ADR (Accident Data Recorder). The FDR records instructions sent to all electronic systems on an aircraft, including the auto-pilot and the security system for the entry to the cockpit.

Whatever information might be provided by the conversation between the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit would have to be corroborated or confirmed by the hard data from the FDR. Analyzing this data naturally takes several days or weeks, so it was surprising that, within 24 hours of the crash, the New York Times had cited an unnamed "senior French military official" as saying that one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit by the other and that was what caused the crash. The NY Times quotes the military official:

"The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door, and there is no answer," the investigator said. "And then he hits the door stronger, and no answer. There is never an answer. You can hear he is trying to smash the door down. [...] what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door."

The precipitous release of this information appears to have undermined the official investigation that is being conducted by the French 'Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety' (BEA) a civilian, not military, agency of the French government responsible for investigating aviation accidents, and established a narrative that has become the official truth of what happened to the plane - it was deliberately crashed by co-pilot Andreas Lubitz. 

Read more

China and Russia Firm Ties With High Speed Rail Link

New Eastern Outlook

The growing fusion of economic self-interest between Russia and China has just taken another major step forward with the final decision by Beijing and Moscow governments to build a critical link in a high-speed rail infrastructure that will connect Beijing and Moscow. It follows only weeks after signing major energy deals between the two Eurasian nations as Putin’s Russia continues her dramatic shift away from a contemptuous EU towards the world’s fastest-growing region. 

Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich announced at a Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum on February 27 that agreement has been finalized between the two countries on a proposal made by Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang during his October 2014 visit to Moscow to construct a 7,000 km and $242 billion high-speed rail corridor going from Beijing across Kazakhstan and Russia to Moscow. The project will include a high-speed Moscow to Kazar in Russia’s Autonomous Tatarstan.

While the economies of the EU sink deeper into debt and stagnation of investment in its own rail and other infrastructure, China has become the world’s premier infrastructure builder. In a space little more than thirty years, the Asian country has become the world specialist in railway construction with projects across China and beyond. Last year the Chinese government announced that it had made construction of a trans-Eurasian high speed rail project, the so-called New Silk Road, highest state priority.

Read more

The Great High-Speed Rail Lie

sfgate.com

In 2008, voters approved a $10 billion bond to begin construction of a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco that would make that trip in less than three hours. So who knew that by 2011 the general consensus would be that the project is an ill-conceived, mismanaged boondoggle? Former Amtrak spokesman and Reason Foundation writer Joseph Vranich knew. In 2008, before the state Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, he called the project "science fiction." 

He said the train won't travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours because that exceeds the speed of all existing high-speed rail. But on French railway schedules, a TGV (Train À Grande Vitesse) takes two hours, 38 minutes to go from Paris to Avignon. That's 430 miles. The route for the L.A.-to-San Francisco line is 432. So what's going on here? It's simple. Vranich makes stuff up. 

The Reason Foundation is funded by Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, the American Petroleum Institute, Delta Airlines, the National Air Transportation Association and, of course, the Koch Family Foundation. They know what will happen once Americans, furious about gas prices and the way airlines treat them, experience electrically powered 200-mph trains. [...]

Train wreck in China: Web users determined to hold authorities to account

France 24

(Photos and footage on site)

Chinese web users and journalists have defied censors to unleash unusually high levels of criticism towards the government in the wake of a horrific train crash on Saturday, July 23. Many fear that human safety is being sacrificed in the country’s rush to modernize.

According to official accounts, the Chinese response to the crash in the outskirts of the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou was exemplary. The disaster “reflects the superiority of socialism”, the newspaper China Philanthropy Times said, praising the swift government reaction and hundreds of spontaneous blood donors who flocked to the site.

Yet this view isn’t shared by thousands of users of China’s popular Twitter-like Sina-Weibo service, many of whom released pictures and videos of the crash long before official news agencies did. In the past few days, micro-bloggers have questioned whether the true death toll may be higher than the official one of 39, and argued that the high-speed rail system is being developed too fast, to the detriment of security standards.

Above all, thousands have criticised what they say is the local authority’s rushed response to the crash, and the national government’s apparent indifference. It was Weibo users who revealed that the railway ministry buried parts of wrecked trains near the site instead of sending them to be examined to determine the causes of the malfunction. The ministry said the trains contained valuable “national level” technology that could be stolen and thus must be buried, but web users fear they are hiding evidence of construction flaws. On Thursday, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported that the wreckage  was dug out again and brought to a nearby train station for further investigation. [...]