You guys see this yet? Very interesting.
Mostly a tempest in a teapot. They should let a real news department handle stories like these. (If you could still find one.)
First wheezing about whether the plane was NORDO sooner than they’ve been saying. Red herring.
Then asking “how are we ever gonna know” how long it really was. Duh, maybe check the ATC tapes.
Speculating that the crew flew an extra 15 min before calling in, to run out the FDR. Fact-free unattributed speculation. Now really – if you were the captain, would you take this chance if you expected the Tomcats any minute?
“The more you look into this, the uglier it gets.” But the only demonstrable ugliness he mentions is the delay getting to NORAD. Every other bit of ugliness is cooked up in his own head.
Most likely the delay was an FAA judgment call as to whether and when the flight becomes a threat. NWA188’s main symptom was being NORDO. Meanwhile, it stayed on plan, except for staying at FL370 too long. Nothing unusual happened with the transponder in that time. So it doesn’t sound like any kind of hijacking or a threat to people or assets on the ground, and arguably the delay wasn’t putting anyone at risk. When it flew past MSP, you might start to worry about getting the crew’s attention before they run dry. So I’d like FAA to respond more quickly, but I don’t see a big problem with what they did.
Fox News just wants a trial and conviction of SOMEBODY before the story goes completely stale. They don’t want to wait a year for the NTSB to speak.
Oh, by the way, we already have a thread for NWA188:
discussions.flightaware.com/view … &start=125
Didn’t you hear? They retired the Tomcats in Sept 2006. Now all they’ve got is those tiny little F-16s.
And the slightly bigger F-15. And those Raptor thingies…and the Hornet…Ohhh, nevermind. 