Thursday, October 4, 2018

TARGET DESTINATIONS

I was looking at images of the elite new condo for the wealthiest elite in New York City that sticks up with a very distinctive look overlooking Central Park and all the little people and as I scanned through the images I was struck by the amount of damage a single plane loaded with fuel could do to that building in this day of guided missiles made out of airliners and thought about what the world would miss if such an attack happened there. And the only thing that came immediately to mind was the mind-boggling amount of art that would disappear and then a moment later it struck me that most of the 'art' in such a place is bound to be 'modern and post modern art' and decided we really wouldn't miss all that much if the building vanished in a pile of rubble.

Target
Then I thought of Burj al Khaleej in Dubai and had the same thought and laughed at myself. One of the things known to anybody sailing the Persian Gulf, listening to the International Air Distress frequency, is that whenever a United Arab Emirates Air Defense station challenges any flight with a demand to immediately alter course or be fired upon, pilots all up and down the Gulf roger up and change course and advise the calling station that they are altering course. I listened to those conversations for hundreds of hours spent in CIC and always laughed when people later talked about what happened when the Robo-Cruiser warned off a plane before opening fire. "Nobody takes those warnings seriously," they scoffed.

Target
The thing with that though, is that people have to believe deep in their hearts that you really will open fire. Oddly enough, there are an awful lot of people that don't believe in the sanctity of human life.

2 comments:

capt fast said...

what is the most likely to succeed method of preventing any more airliners from purposefully flying into buildings? Know for sure what it is not! it is not disarming everyone on the plane.

HMS Defiant said...

ADIZ, armed fighters in 5 minute alert or maintaining continuous CAP over primary targets, terminal heavy defenisive ground based air defenses that can rip a 747 to pieces in a fraction of a second because all the pieces will continue towards the target for some little time and most primary targets are surrounded by far more numerous but still juicy secondary targets. Kind of like Nagasaki. The primary that day was Kokura but it was covered by smoke and Bock's Car headed to the secondary target. Nagasaki was unobscured and so 'won' the toss.
I'm afraid the TSA was a joke and remains a joke and has failed 100% of the security tests and even then? what's to keep the mohammad out of the cockpit if he's flying the plane for the airline?