First birds and ice (also see this) and now these?
"Plane's engine parts fall from sky in Brazil" by Associated Press | March 27, 2009
SAO PAULO - Engine pieces from a US plane fell from the sky early yesterday in Brazil, hitting 22 houses and a car but sparing passengers and residents on the ground.
Pieces of one of the turbines of the DC-10 plunged to the ground in the
Television images showed houses with damage to their roofs as an engine piece nearly 6 feet long lay nearby in front of amazed onlookers. Residents said the piece was still on fire after hitting a parked car.
"You're sound asleep when suddenly you hear a noise and open your window to see something like that on fire on your doorstep," resident Aparecida Silva told Globo TV. "I didn't know what it was. Fortunately, it didn't hit anyone."
That particular piece - which appeared to be the tip of the turbine - weighed about 550 pounds, according to Globo, which also reported that a church was hit by one of the engine parts.
Just wondering why Flight 93 was vaporized, but.... WATCH
Arrow Cargo's station manager in Manaus, Rai Marinho, said the company will pay local residents for the damage to their property. Marinho said that the plane, with four people aboard, was able to continue flying using its other two engines.
Three crew members and a mechanic were aboard the aircraft, which apparently encountered engine problems about five minutes after takeoff, Marinho said. The flight, headed to Bogota, was later diverted by bad weather to Medellin, where it landed without problems, the Colombian Air Force said.
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QUITO, Ecuador - At least four people were killed when an Ecuadorean military plane crashed into two buildings yesterday in the fog-bound capital city Quito, authorities said.
Interesting: Ecuador Expels the CIA
Defense Minister Javier Ponce said the three military personnel aboard the Beechcraft plane died in the crash and one other person was killed on the ground. Emergency officials on the site said the plane hit two buildings in a wealthy neighborhood in the northern sector of the city before it crashed in a backyard.
"I felt an explosion when I opened the front door and then heard a loud sound before we raced out," said Elena Morocho, a maid in a nearby home. The plane crashed near a hotel and the US ambassador's residence in the city. A US Embassy spokeswoman said the ambassador was unharmed.
Fog often causes aviation difficulties and delays in the Andean mountain city. In the last two decades several planes have crashed in the hilly, Gonzalez Suarez neighborhood that stands on the path of landing planes.
Don't they have RADAR that can SEE THROUGH THAT stuff?
In September last year, a plane carrying more than 60 people skidded off a runway and crashed through a perimeter wall before stopping near a busy road, but no one was seriously hurt.
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And WTF is with this NEXT ITEM?
WASHINGTON --The Federal Aviation Administration is proposing to keep secret from travelers its vast records on how frequently and where commercial planes are damaged by hitting flying birds.
The government agency argued that some carriers and airports would stop reporting the incidents for fear the public would misinterpret the data and hold it against them... The agency's formal secrecy proposal came just after FAA officials had said they were going to release the huge database to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
As President Barack Obama promises a more open government, the FAA says it needs to expand secrecy to cover this safety data because if the public learned the information then airports and air carriers wouldn't report damage from birds.
What a BULLSHIT REASON!!!
As for Obama, give it up: Breaking News: Obama to Immunize Nazis Over Holocaust
"To have the government actually chill public access to safety information is a step backward," said James Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. "Public awareness is an essential part of any strong safety program."
After a multiple bird strike forced a US Airways jet to ditch in the Hudson River on Jan. 15, the AP requested access to the bird strike database, which contains more than 100,000 reports of bird strikes that have been voluntarily submitted since 1990....
Before then, when was the last time you heard of a plane going down because of birds. More like they were barbecued after getting suck into those engines!
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FAA officials have emphasized that the loss of both of a jetliner's engines to bird strikes is very rare. The FAA's engine safety rules do not require that engines continue to produce thrust after a bird strike, only that they do not break into pieces upon impact with a bird weighing eight pounds or less....
That's all it takes to bust up a jet engine? An eight-pound bird?
I'll never go on a plane. I'll be like Shatner in the 'Twilight Zone": There are birds out there! Birds out there!!!!!
Richard A. Dolbeer, wrote the safety board about four incidents in 2005-2007 in which both engines of an airliner were damaged -- by yellow-legged gulls in Rome, canvasback ducks in Chicago, starlings in Washington, D.C., and doves in Ohio. In a 2005 incident, a Falcon 20 freight aircraft ingested mourning doves into both engines, lost all power, slid through an airport security fence in Ohio and across a highway into a corn field.
Noting that the incidents "occurred in widely diverse geographic locations and involved four different species of birds," Dolbeer wrote that they "show the margins between safety and catastrophe are becoming rather thin."After all this time is suddenly a problem?
They building sh***ier planes now?
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