Field McConnell, a pilot for Northwest Airlines, has filed a lawsuit charging that many commercial airliners are rigged with explosives that can be remotely detonated. He refuses to fly until such devices are removed. McConnell’s claim is seemingly given credence by none other than Boeing’s vice-president, who tacitly admitted the fact in a speech last year.
“The lawsuit, filed last week, claims Boeing Co. and the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) can’t assure him that B747-400 planes are safe. McConnell, who is the process of seeking an early retirement from Northwest, claims the planes are rigged by Boeing and can be remotely detonated,” reports the West Central Tribune .
The quote has no context. Even so I don’t see how you get from explosives designed to blow open a door to explosives designed to take down an aircraft in the case of a hijacking. Not that logic plays into it, of course.
Exactly. This is a classic example of a “quote” not saying what the person quoting it purports. So this is a purposely malicious misquote by attaching a wrong context, or otherwise the person who wrote the story is really mental.
Many systems use explosively operated actuators—safety valves, door interlocks, etc, as Charybdis points out.
This is another instance of a reasonable person, Bain, the Boeing Sr VP, pointing out the lunacy of zero tolerance policies that are implemented without thought. His statement is then taken out of context and used to support the argument of an idiot.
This is why some people should not be allowed to vote.
I also doubt the veracity of the quote from Doug Bain’s speech. The first sentence in his quote (the last paragraph of the quoted story) is a sentence fragment of the sort that no one would actually make in a speech. It even sounds like something’s missing.
I also doubt the veracity of the quote from Doug Bain’s speech. The first sentence in his quote (the last paragraph of the quoted story) is a sentence fragment of the sort that no one would actually make in a speech. It even sounds like something’s missing.
Yeah, I wondered about that, too. So I went to check to see if there was a more complete quoatation anywhere, or if that really was what he said. It took me a while to find it (the conspiracy forums are having a field day with this whole lawsuit, and filling up the search engines with their musings), but here’s Bain’s complete speech. And here’s the part in question:
“And one nasty little thing is that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which has an almost explicit prohibition on possessing explosives. For those of you who are at BCA [Boeing Commercial Airplanes], you might remember that every single door on an airplane has actuators that are triggered by explosives.”
So the quotation wasn’t edited. Of course, it also doesn’t mean what many of the conspiracy theorists are making it sound like. It’s not a bunch of explosives embedded in the airplane that the government can blow up at will. It’s a few explosive bolts that the air crew can detonate by pushing a lever or whatever, and that will make the door drop off so that it won’t jam in an emergency.
Actually, Donald Trump had this great idea whereby all passenger jets would be refitted and if any trouble begins in the cabin the cockpit door should be airtight and the cockpit crew would release a fast acting sleep gas into the cabin.
