Reply #227: And a King Air uses mechanical flight-surface controls

[jmowreader]

The King Air 200 has been around for 40 years, so it contains "proven technology" for controlling the rudders and ailerons and things. Not too much chance of fucking that up from the ground. If this was an Airbus I'd say yeah, you could screw with the control surfaces from the ground, but on a plane that's controlled by cables? No way.

If they would have killed only one engine, that could have made the plane veer off course like this one did. Two-engine airplanes are capable of flying safely on one engine (the FAA doesn't issue a type certificate to a plane that can't do this), but I would imagine that when the one engine goes out, you have to do something to compensate for the total loss of power on one side of the plane and you wouldn't have time to do this on final approach. This paragraph is academic in nature because if you sent an electrical pulse that can shut down one engine up to the plane, it's going to shut down both engines and, once again, you're dealing with an engine-out approach--any licensed pilot should be able to fly one of those.

I'd look at more prosaic answers to this quandary:

* some sort of sabotage, although this is unlikely--Wellstone took this plane on the spur of the moment, and GOP sabotage would require having a saboteur in every airport in Minnesota.
* a pilot who loved Bush so much he was willing to give his life for The Cause. Islam can't be the only religion in the world that's got suicidal nutcases in it.
* a really weird weather condition that "flipped" the plane--an updraft that grabbed one wing, perhaps.
* or what I really think it was--every once in a while, planes do break down in the air and crash, and this particular one just happened to have the leader of the antiwar faction in the Senate on it when it went.

I'm saddened and outraged too, but we need to ask ourselves "What would Paul Wellstone do?" then go forth and do it. We are NOT going to nail Bush over this. (OTOH, the anthrax killer is still a fertile field for Bush-nailing, because I think we can get him on that if we are pure in our thoughts and deeds.)