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Post by craiglamson on Sept 22, 2005 12:34:36 GMT -4
From this link www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKcostella.htmJohn Costella was born in Australia. After graduating with honors degrees in both electrical engineering and the sciences from the University of Melbourne, he completed a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. After three years of postdoctoral research and lecturing at the University of Melbourne he was appointed as a teacher of Mathematics, Physics and Information Technology at Mentone Grammar. Costella has researched the assassination of John F. Kennedy and has undertaken a sophisticated analyses of the Zapruder Film. Two of his articles, A Scientist's Verdict: The Film is a Fabrication and Mary Moorman and Her Polaroids appeared in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (edited by James H. Fetzer).
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Post by JayUtah on Sept 22, 2005 13:18:19 GMT -4
I stand corrected; thank you.
Costella should therefore have the training to understand the engineering implications here, but I don't see any evidence of that understanding. He displays no more practical understanding than a layman. He appears not to have industry experience -- in fact, no experience outside of the academic. I don't know of a single electrical engineer who actually believes, for example, that a hand-held video game affects airliner avionics.
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Post by twinstead on Sept 22, 2005 13:30:32 GMT -4
I in fact, no experience outside of the academic. I don't know of a single electrical engineer who actually believes, for example, that a hand-held video game affects airliner avionics. I think the quote below made earlier in the thread makes a lot of sense concerning video games and cellphones: They take nail clippers away from passengers now. Do you think they'd let you take a cell phone -- and simply promise not to use it -- if there was a chance it could cause a crash? Yes, one would think that if they were such a huge risk, folks would be just as serious about not taking Game Boys on planes as they are box cutters.
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Post by jameshfetzer on Sept 23, 2005 0:15:18 GMT -4
I don't understand these cheap shots that have no basis in reality. My qualifications are published in all of my books and are publicly available at my academic web site, which anyone can access. There is no excuse for this cheap, nasty rubbish. www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer/ If anyone here has a serious interest in the Wellstone case, then they ought to read the piece that John P. Costella and I have published, "The NTSB Failed Wellstone", which may be found in fromthewilderness.com and accessed as follows: www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/070605_wellstone.shtml No doubt it would be too much to suggest that you actually read the book Four Arrows and I co-authored. He holds a Ph.D. as well as an Ed.D., by the way, and has published more than a dozen books. Costella's qualifications are exceptional.
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Post by twinstead on Sept 23, 2005 5:37:39 GMT -4
What cheap shots?
Most of these folks are qualified to legitimately question both credentials and conclusions.
Am I wrong, but wouldn't the correct response be to answer the issues they raise?
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Post by craiglamson on Sept 23, 2005 7:50:15 GMT -4
I don't understand these cheap shots that have no basis in reality. My qualifications are published in all of my books and are publicly available at my academic web site, which anyone can access. There is no excuse for this cheap, nasty rubbish. www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer/ If anyone here has a serious interest in the Wellstone case, then they ought to read the piece that John P. Costella and I have published, "The NTSB Failed Wellstone", which may be found in fromthewilderness.com and accessed as follows: www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/070605_wellstone.shtml No doubt it would be too much to suggest that you actually read the book Four Arrows and I co-authored. He holds a Ph.D. as well as an Ed.D., by the way, and has published more than a dozen books. Costella's qualifications are exceptional. Hello Jim...interesting to see you here but I'm not so sure you are gonna survive, but please stick around and give it a shot.
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Post by JayUtah on Sept 23, 2005 9:46:46 GMT -4
I don't understand these cheap shots that have no basis in reality.
No "cheap shots" were intended. However, when one's academic credentials are chiefly all that is presented in order to support some conclusion, then the applicability of those credentials must obviously feature in the rebuttal.
However, if you will note, there is little actually to do with credentials in my comments. I noted their inapplicability to this question once -- or at most twice -- and then devoted my attention to responding factually and directly to the arguments presented.
If anyone here has a serious interest in the Wellstone case...
My interest is only casual. I was asked to comment on the excerpt supplied here, and I obliged. I have no desire to plow through a book-length discussion, although I will of course be pleased to respond to any specific questions about or corrections to my comments.
He [Four Arrows] holds a Ph.D. as well as an Ed.D., by the way, and has published more than a dozen books. Costella's qualifications are exceptional.
None of those credentials has anything to do with how airplanes are made and operated.
I unfortunately left my own PhD work in engineering and computer science in order to go work in the aerospace industry, where I have worked on and off for several years. I am currently laboring for a subcontrator in support of the Boeing 787 project, among others. While a graduate student at the University of Utah I had the opportunity to be a PhD candidate as well as to associate with and to teach them. I can assure you I am not intimidated by diplomas waved in the air. I am certainly no friend of the argument that academic credentials ensure against error in whatever topic the holder chooses to discuss.
I owe an apology, of course, for having misrepresented Costella's academic qualifications. It was not intentional; but it was nevertheless inexcusable. However he lacks appropriate domain knowledge, and his deficiency shows. I see nothing in his c.v. that qualifies him to speak as an expert on how airplane equipment is constructed. The same with you and your pseudonymed co-author. The line of reasoning that seems to prevail in the excerpt, and in your initial response here is that academic achievement alone -- however inapplicable -- guarantees correctness.
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Sept 23, 2005 19:30:21 GMT -4
Only a very little metal is required to adequately shield electronics against EMI. A foil would suffice.
I can vouch for that, albeit, anecdotally.
As ham radio operators, my brother and I were responsible for much EMI in our neighborhood. Our signal would come out quite loud in our next-door neighbor's speakers because, presumably, the signal was getting induced somewhere in the preamp circuits of his stereo receiver and then amplified by the final stage. It had only a wooden cover with no shielding, so we covered the inside with aluminum foil and it resolved the problem completely.
For the affected TV sets, we had pretty good results, as I remember, with filters we added before the receiver front-end. Receivers have a "front-end" amplifier that boost the weak signal coming from the antenna. The ones in consumer devices tend to be pretty cheap and have limited dynamic range. Our signal was on a different frequency that the TV would normally reject with its filters. But our signal was so strong that it would overload the front-ends causing them to distort and generate signals at spurious frequencies. Shielding would not have helped in this case because some of the spurious signals were at the right frequency to be "welcomed in" by the TV filters. The filters we added provided enough additional attenuation to prevent our signal from overloading the front-end.
Instead of the gymnastics he employs here, he could just simply look at the type of shielding used in avionics and see what it is, instead of trying to infer what it must be.
I wish Costella did get around to explaining how the types of EMI he describes could have affected Wellstone's plane. The EMI he describes is all relatively low energy. In Fetzer and Costella's The NTSB Failed Wellstone article, the type of EMI they mention requires enough energy to start an electrical fire:
When we had two dipole antennas strung in the back yard, I once connected a flashlight bulb to one and transmitted on the other with a few hundred watts. That induced enough voltage in the second antenna to blow the bulb. (I couldn't induce enough voltage to light up a 100-watt bulb, as I remember.) Those antennas were within feet of each other. Are there really weapons with the power required to start an electrical fire in a plane flying overhead?
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Post by ktesibios on Sept 23, 2005 20:48:14 GMT -4
A great many "vintage" electric guitars and basses were manufactured without any electrostatic shielding for the pickups, wiring and controls. This in conjunction with the high impedance of pickup circuirts and amplifier inputs made them extremely vulnerable to electrostatically (i.e., capacitively) coupled hum and buzz from the 60 Hz electrical wiring that surrounds us.
My fix for this, which was always successful, was to remove the pickups and controls, line the pickup and control cavities with ordinary household aluminum foil, connect the foil to circuit common ("ground"), replace any open wiring with shielded cable and implement a single-point grounding scheme.
Worked like a charm. Nowadays I would use self-adhesive copper foil shielding tape, but the principle's the same- surround the circuitry with an equipotential surface, which doesn't have to be terribly thick.
Much of the digital audio gear I work on now has to contend with having high-amplitude pulses (in the digital section) in close proximity to sensitive analog circuitry. Somehow the engineers who design these gadgets manage to keep the interference problem under control with shielding of rather thin sheet metal or even aluminized plastic.
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lenbrazil
Saturn
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!
Posts: 1,045
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Post by lenbrazil on Sept 23, 2005 22:12:01 GMT -4
Costella's qualifications are exceptional. LOL Costella's only qualifications are academic he is a high school teacher. He has only published four papers, one was a preliminary version of his doctoral thesis in an online journal that apparently will publish just about anything, the others were about teaching various aspects of physics. I'm sure Jay's assessment of his understanding of EMI is dead on. He and Fetzer think you can have an electrical fire WITHOUT electricity! So I wonder well the hell he is teaching his students. I also have serious doubts about that 1 in 33 pre '84 planes will crash figure. Someone on another forum though he didn't notice minus sign in the article and multiplied instead of dividing. Jay [or others] what do you think about the claim that without electrical power the props of the King Air would stop spinning? A QUESTION FOR AUSTRALIANSHow hard is it to get into U of Melbourne and get PhD there? Is it considered to be a good school?
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Post by Obviousman on Sept 24, 2005 0:43:38 GMT -4
I wish Costella did get around to explaining how the types of EMI he describes could have affected Wellstone's plane. The EMI he describes is all relatively low energy. In Fetzer and Costella's The NTSB Failed Wellstone article, the type of EMI they mention requires enough energy to start an electrical fire: That quote from the article seems to be typical of his arguements - misleading. The aircraft in question have mechnical linkages as well; even without electrical power - or even if the electrical circuits were destroyed - you still have control over the engines and the propellor pitch.. If the solenoid activated to put the pitch into either full fine or feather, you'd be able to over-ride it.
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Post by ktesibios on Sept 24, 2005 1:04:55 GMT -4
Now that I've read "The NTSB Failed Wellstone", there are a few things I think are worth taking note of.
First, there's this (also quoted in Joe Durnavich's post):
Sorry, a solenoid is not an electrical switch. The term "solenoid" refers to geometry, specifically a coil which is longer than its diameter. In electronic usage, "solenoid" generally means a solenoid coil which is used as an electromagnet so that when energized it pulls a movable core of magnetic material into the coil. This can be used to actuate all sorts of mechanical things, including switches. There's a commonly used trick for solenoids which are used to actuate a mechanical linkage- since it takes a higher coil current to pull the core in from its rest position than it does to hold it in, you arrange a switch which will be actuated when the core is completely pulled in, so as to reduce the coil drive from the higher pull-in value to the hold-in value.
When someone who is clearly claiming expert status makes a howling mistake in basic technical usage like that, my instinct is to dock them quite a few credibility points.
Then we have gems like this:
Standard-issue conspiracist language trick. If you get the prejudicial language in the right place, you can leave the reader with the impression that the fire has been established as being suspicious even though you haven't actually explained why it should be considered so.
There's also the traditional "six degrees of separation" game, aimed at creating an atmosphere of suspicion, whether or not the "suspicious" connections are relevant to the subject at hand:
Now, why the fact that the co-pilot had met Moussaoui should be germane to finding the cause of the accident in which he died is not explained. It doesn't have to be. The point is to engage in set-dressing; to do the written equivalent of cueing the spooky music and the fog machine. Note the scare quotes around "inadvertently"- just in case the presence of Moussaoui doesn't create a creepy enough atmosphere, the utterly unsupported implication that Guess consciously aided a terrorist plot might do the trick.
More of the same rhetorical technique:
Again, why this should be relevant is left unexplained. It does serve the purpose of playing on the conspiracist audience's traditional suspicion of any government agency, especially the military. Implying that the NTSB should have pursued this helps to reinforce the impression of either incompetent investigation or cover-up. More set-dressing.
The confusion both before and after the flight is demonstrable, but why call it "intrigue"? The American Heritage Dictionary defines "intrigue" (as a noun) as "1a. A secret or underhand scheme; a plot. b. The practice of or involvement in such schemes. 2. A clandestine love affair." Unless it can be shown that people who were trying to get their transportation arrangements together under adverse conditions were engaged in a secret or underhand scheme, which Costella and Fetzer don't even try to do, this is nothing more than another attempt to manipulate the reader by slipping in a word with negative connotations- which I would call an underhand scheme.
That the flight was not cancelled is amply demonstrated by the fact that it crashed. What, then, are the discrepancies which need to be resolved? As to the speculation that someone impersonated the pilot, the most parsimonious explanation for its absence from the public documentation is that it was not considered a serious possibility and that the final report on an accident investigation is expected to be focused on verifiable facts and what can be inferred from them, not on speculative notions for which no evidence can be found.
In keeping with the theme of "throw as much mud as you possibly can in the hope that it will stick to the reader's brain", the pilot comes in for his share of innuendo:
Don't bother explaining just what this might have to do with the pilot's abilities and performance. Just try to induce the reader to infer that there's something suspicious about him. After all, the dead don't get peeved at being indirectly defamed.
Seeing all these classic conspiracy-monger tricks is especially tiresome since we've just had a forty-page course in them at the Turbonium School of Rhetoric. There's no need to support your speculative scenario by providing direct evidence in its favor nor to demonstrate that it does a superior job of explaining all the available observations- or even that it is consistent with them. Concentrate on piling up the "could have"s and "might be"s, never mind about the "was" and "is". If your theory needs secretly planted explosives, or thermite, or an electrical fire, just assume them. If you can find enough things in the commonly held understanding of an event to label "discrepancies" and create a suitably creepy atmosphere by playing up superficially suspicious-looking irrelevancies, you might be able to handwave your way to a rejection of the entirety of the "official story". Having accomplished that, you have only to assume that your conspiracy theory will then prevail by default.
Now, being a mere ignorant, uneducated technician, I feel no obligation to observe the niceties of academic etiquette, nor have I ever had any inclination to forelock-tugging in the presence of people with letters after their names. So, I can state my unvarnished opinion of Fetzer and Costella's piece:
It's a garden-variety paranoid conspiracy theory built from the same basic reuseable modules seen in most PCTs, argued for with garden-variety rhetorical tricks and thoroughly pedestrian bad reasoning, advocated by people with a history of promoting PCTs, published on the Web site of someone who makes a living by peddling PCTs.
In other words, piffle.
In the immortal words of the late William Steig, "I say it's spinach and I say the Hell with it".
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Post by JayUtah on Sept 24, 2005 2:37:20 GMT -4
The equipment I manufacture produces prodigious amounts of EMI, but we can easily shield it and obtain FCC, UL, and CE approval. We use aluminized ABS plastic; it is quite effective and very cheap compared to more exotic shielding methods.
As for academic credentials, it is not necessary to assess the relative strength or weakness of each of the academic programs. It doesn't matter much whether Costella or anyone else graduated from an "easy" or "difficult" program. What matters more, to me anyway, is that none of these authors seems to have any experience outside their academic settings. It is sufficient to note that they have no industry experience. The University of Utah, through its proximity to the Utah Air National Guard bases and Hill AFB, is a focus of much aerospace research. It is not qutie as good as Utah State in Logan, which maintains a rigorous aerospace program, but it is competent. And I have been around airplanes as a student pilot, enthusiast, and engineer since I was 16. I have worked for various Boeing subcontractors since about 1990 and am fairly familiar with their designs and practices. I spent a pleasant afternoon last week with Mr. Douglas Ball, the chief engineer of Boeing's Enabling Technologies division, discussing how to design and build airplanes.
The excerpt I was asked to review discussed fault conditions induced in fly-by-wire or digital systems, which typically use complexly formatted or modulated signals in order to convey command information throughout the system, and which for that reason may be more susceptible to EMI than more straightforward electrical applications that convey only current. I have already stated that the example cases are selectively chosen to amplify the apparent danger of EMI to flight control systems.
However the claim is being made that the more straightforward systems have been compromised. Thus the FBW examples are a red herring.
Fuel systems for jet turbine engines are notoriously complex. I would have to see the exact designs for the engine in question to make an informed statement in this specific case. I will therefore answer generally.
Overspeed sensors and associated solenoids or trim valves that correct the condition by altering the fuel flow to the engine are common and necessary design features on gas turbine engines. I have never seen an engine design that used a purely electrical overspeed protection system where the components were not multiply redundant in such a way as to require multiple circuit completions or switch closures to supply power to the cutoff solenoids. This is done obviously to reduce the chance of inadvertent in-flight engine cutoff due to short-circuits, vibration, or other control system failures (such as a faulty sensor) -- exactly the scenario proposed.
A "fire in the cockpit" as the cause for a spoofed engine overspeed trip is pure handwaving. Multiple independent circuit closures would have to occur as a result in both engine control systems order to fail the engines by the suggested method. Where overspeed sensors activate the cutoffs, all sensors must agree that an overspeed condition exists. This is standard fail-safe "voting logic" employed in all human-rated control systems. Where test switches are provided to close control circuits in place of the sensors, all the switches must be closed simultaneously in order to activate the solenoid.
The electricity to operate the solenoid normally comes from the engine's electrical bus. If the aircraft's electrical power fails, the solenoids and sensors cannot operate. Fuel control in that case fails over to a strictly hydromechanical system which does not, in general, provide for overspeed protection but will allow thrust control for safe flight and landing. Because fuel delivery requirements for such powerplants are so constrained, the fuel systems are often excellent examples of reliability-based engineering.
If the electrical supply to operate the solenoids is theorized to have come directly from a hypothetical electromagnetic pulse that induced a current in the electrical wiring in the absence of energy from the (presumably compromised) alternator, then not only do multiple mechanical and electromechanically operated circuits have to close and remained closed simultaneously, but somehow the elecrical current has to be within the tolerance required by the solenoid to operate properly. Too much and the solenoid simply burns out and fail-safes to the open position. To little and the solenoid will not operate.
If the power to the solenoids is theorized to have come from the alternator as designed, then we have to reason why a hypothetical EMP powerful enough to start a cockpit fire, such as to close the overspeed test circuits, did not also fail the alternators. The authors simply wish us to believe that this catastrophic hypothetical EMP blast had exactly the right electrical properties to achieve a result that is actually anticipated by the system designers and guarded against. In effect they have merely postulated a Magical King-Air Crashing Machine.
The nature of the EMP theorized to have had this effect is certainly mysterious. It was said to disrupt cellular communications, but the only named witness to that effect has apparently denied that his experience was unexpected or anomalous. Why weren't household or car radios disrupted? Why not the ATC or military radars that surveilled the area during the time when this supposed EMP occurred? Why not the myriad computers in the vicinity?
It is argued that garage doors "mysteriously" activated. However, I am skeptical. These devices also operate in a fail-safe mode to prevent unauthorized entry. It is not merely a "pulse" of EM that operates them, but only the properly modulated electrical pulse that activates the circuit. We're apparently supposed to believe that this massive EMP magically generated the right electromagnetic signals to trip these security-minded systems.
The supposed secondary evidence for EMP is highly selective. Clearly the hypothetical pulse is non-directional, since it is alleged to have had effects other than in the direction of the aircraft, and at greater distance. Without any directionality, the pulse would have obeyed the inverse square law for electromagnetic radiation and attenuated rapidly with distance. Thus the emitter would have to be extraordinarily powerful in order for so much energy to have been received ath the airplane. And the non-directional signal apparently failed to exhibit any of the classic signs of EMP: static in radio transmissions, noise in radio (e.g., radar) signals, malfunctions in digital and other complex electronic systems.
EM radiation cheats the inverse square law by being focused and directed, such as by a parabolic antenna. A weapon -- especially one intended to be used clandestinely -- would benefit from such direction both by reducing collateral damage and reducing detection, and reducing the emitted power requirements. The hypothetical EM weapon in this tale seems to have been quite poorly designed.
I am not in a position to authoritatively say what kinds of EM weapons may exist. Certainly we have had electronic warfare for decades, at least in the form of radio-based jamming. However, the weapon theorized to have caused this aircraft crash does not exist until it is proven to exist. The authors seem simply to argue that it "must" exist simply because it "might" exist. I can't imagine how someone as supposedly well-versed in epistemology as Dr. Fetzer's credentials suggest would allow such a fundamentally flawed argument to appear under his name.
In any case, the majority of the article -- which I have as yet skimmed and not studied -- seems to be the standard conspiracist FUD-oriented nit-picking at official findings, apparently in the hope that identifying any perception of impropriety in the official account supports the authors' specific allegations. Accident investigation is a demanding and detailed profession, not mastered in the classroom but in the field. Proficiency derives from experience, not from textbooks. I simply don't trust inexperienced academics to provide any meaningful criticism to an actual investigation, especially when the alternative they are serving up wouldn't even amount to a good Stargate SG-1 episode.
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Post by JayUtah on Sept 24, 2005 3:17:00 GMT -4
Sorry, a solenoid is not an electrical switch.
I'm not sure whether Costella is simply confused, or whether he has used inaccurate language to describe the entire control system.
I presume he is attempting to describe an electrically-activated overspeed protector, which uses sensors, switches (for test) and solenoid-based mechanical actuators. In such a system, a series of RPM sensors is located at various points on the turbine and propeller assemblies so as to read the turbine speed. Each sensor is routed through a signal conditioner to normalize its output, and then through an AND-oriented switch matrix to the control input of a solenoid-based actuator.
To test this system on the ground, each normalized sensor output is wired in parallel with a simple switch that can be closed in the cockpit, or from a service panel elsewhere in the aircraft, to simulate the activation of the sensor. The normal procedure to test the overspeed cutoff function is first to close each test switch individually to verify that a single sensor (or anything less than the full set) cannot by itself trip the overspeed cutoff. Then the switches are closed simultaneously and the operation of the actuator armature is verified visually, mechanically, and/or electrically.
The solenoid must be energized for a specified minimum period in order to draw the armature fully. It must be energized for a considerably longer period thereafter, maintaining the armature in its fully retracted position, to attenuate or stop the fuel flow to the engine and correct the overspeed condition.
This arrangement prevents transient operation of the cutoff due to vibration, and inadvertent electrical activation due to electrical fault, switch bounce, or other improper electrical signals. When the actuator has remained energized long enough for the engine to drop below its minimum sustainable rotation rate, it does not matter if fuel flow is restored to the engine; it will continue to spin down.
This condition is normally enforced by the hysteresis properties of the sensor; the sensors "trip" at a certain value, but do not reset when the measured property falls below that same value -- rather they reset at a much lower value. This is a common property of sensor arrays in order to eliminate high-frequency cycling in the control system.
Whether the correction of an overspeed entails flaming out the engine entirely by starving it of fuel for an extended period, or merely restoring it to a credible speed, is a matter of policy for the designers.
Whether the solenoid actuators in question employed the step-down associated with holding current rather than drawing current is actually an optimization issue and doesn't necessary change the operating conditions pertinent to the claims.
If Costella refers to the test switches, which can be used instead of the sensors to supply the necessary draw current to the actuator solenoid, then the question is how the EMI managed to close, and maintain closed for a sufficient period, those test switches. If the switches -- or even just one of them -- made only intermittent contact then the solenoid armature would not necessarily even move significantly and there would be little if any disruption to the fuel flow. The pilot would be able to correct for partial or intermittent solenoid energization by increasing the commanded thrust or by pulling the circuit breaker for the overspeed detection circuit and falling back to hydromechanical control.
I stress that these systems are designed precisely to provide, if possible, a serviceable mode of operation if they themselves should fail.
In crash investigations we can never rewind the clock and replay the accident again with proper instrumentation. We can't ever test our theories in that particular fashion. But we do rely heavily on duplicating as many of the hypothesized root causes as we can under controlled and instrumented conditions. So we shoot blocks of foam at carbon panels, or feed DFDR information into simulators and put our best pilots on the spot. I deal a lot with thermal failures. so I have a high-temperature torture chamber in which I can cook things in order to watch them fail and test specific hypothesized mechanisms of thermal failure.
The authors here give us some great rhetorical gymnastics in attempting to dismiss or dispute the practical recreations that were attempted by the NTSB. But for all their diploma-waving and mumbo jumbo about the dangers of EMI, in no way do they attempt to show that electromagnetic radiation can possibly have any of the specific effects they've proposed. They have shown no apparatus that can start a fire in an airplane cockpit from a distance. They have not shown any cockpit fire that will activate the engine overspeed cutoffs as suggested. None of the crucial proposed mechanisms has any demonstration associated with it.
It's pure handwaving. It's the difference between science as practiced in academia and science as practiced by the nuts-and-bolts scientists who actually build and operate this stuff and are held legally responsible for its reliability.
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golfhobo
Venus
DAMN! That woulda gone in the hole IF....
Posts: 86
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Post by golfhobo on Sept 24, 2005 13:06:11 GMT -4
Hello, all. Thanks, Craig, for bringing this topic to a forum that will let me join. Hi, Jim. I will continue, as much as possible, to be civil with you and in return ONLY ask that you don't spam this site with multiple and lengthy irrelevant posts. You should be able to state your case more succinctly. I also would ask Len to be a little more factual and less vitriolic. These people seem to be very intelligent and rational, and probably will abandon this thread if it becomes a mudslinging contest.
I have read Fetzer's book AND the followup article "The NTSB Failed Wellstone." I've also read the report upon which Costella based his entire ERRONEOUS analysis of EMW affects on avionics. I wlll get into that more shortly. I've also read most or all of the factual reports that are the basis for the NTSB's final report as well as the Final Report itself. I have also read all of the pertinent posts on the FetzerclaimsDebunk forum on Yahoo from which most of this discussion follows.
I am impressed with all of the discussion so far on this thread, but I need to point out that some of it is getting off topic as a result of not knowing exactly what Fetzer, et al, have claimed. More on this later. Just for info sakes though, they are not claiming that the EM caused engine failure due to interrupted fuel flow or otherwise. The switches, governors or actuators (whatever they call them,) are responsible for setting the pitch of the propellers. There will be much discussion on this, I'm sure, but the final word is this: At LEAST one of the governor solenoids was in sufficient shape post impact, to be tested electrically and it PASSED. That should be the end of that discussion - but I'm sure it won't be.
My credentials are in analysis in general, and specifically in electronic signals and intelligence analysis of weapons systems radars. My analysis of the work done by Fetzer, Four Arrows and Costella, has turned up most importantly that they most often misinterpret what they read (and that is their ONLY basis of research into this,) and therefore their wild and incorrect claims come from misunderstanding the data they insist on debating. I once pointed out to Jim that he had made a major blunder in his book concerning which and whose logbooks were in question. As a result, his entire argument was irrelevant and misleading. This process repeats itself over and over in their work. I caution all of you against basing YOUR arguments on what you THINK he is implying. Given the opportunity, I'm sure he will repeat his claims ad infinitum. I will be available, if requested, to fill in the background info you may need before formulating your replies.
Thanks again, for allowing me to join. One of the forums where this is being discussed insisted that I reveal my true identity, and due to my government clearances, that is not a possibility.
One question for JayUtah: Are you the James M that is a member of the Education Forum?
Hobo
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