Offering asides, recommended links, blogworthy quotations, and more, In Brief is the Northwest Progressive Institute's microblog of world, national, and local politics.
Yesterday, the very first Boeing 727 airliner made its final flight from Everett’s Paine Field to Seattle’s Boeing Field to become part of the Museum of Flight’s collection. It went off without a hitch. Watch the final landing and taxi of this meticulously restored aircraft in the above video clip.
Businessweek’s Justin Bachman discusses what airlines are doing to protect their passengers and aircraft in the wake of the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which showed how dangerous it is for airlines to operate over areas consumed by conflict.
We have proof that the terrorist attack was planned and carried out with the involvement of representatives of the Russian Federation… We know that Russia is trying to hide its terrorist activity and their direct involvement.
— Vitaly Nayda, the head of counterintelligence for the Ukrainian State Security Service, expressing his government’s conclusion that Russia was directly involved in the attack that brought down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17.
Businessweek’s Carol Matlack looks at some of the crazy conspiracy theories that supposedly mainstream Russian media outlets are trotting out in response to the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which the United States government says was deliberately destroyed.
Mr. Putin and those who support him seem incapable of accepting that their model of government, with all its cronyism, corruption and bullying, is not the one many former Soviet subjects want.
A prominent scientist who has been investigating AIDS, the Auto Immune Defiency Syndrome, is among those killed in the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, the New York Times reports. He and several colleagues were enroute to Melbourne, Australia, for an important conference.
This is truly a grave situation… Nearly three hundred souls have been lost. The families need consolation and our prayers, and many questions need to be answered. And we’ll get those answers, and we’ll take action accordingly.
A Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion flies past Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield on a mission to drop sonar buoys to assist in the acoustic search in support of Operation Southern Indian Ocean. (Photo: LSIS Bradley Darvill/Commonwealth of Australia)
Imagine driving down the street at seventy miles an hour with a pair of binoculars and trying to look at every single mailbox… You can’t slew your binoculars around fast enough.
In the movies, radar screens show incredible detail about everything. In real life, radar is easily confused, doesn’t see small planes, and may have trouble determining altitudes. Transponders solve this by reporting an aircraft’s altitude, speed, directional heading and identification code to air traffic controllers and nearby aircraft, using an electronic format that syncs with radar. And the identification codes tell controllers which blip is which flight, something radar has no way to detect.
Malaysian officials have what they say is “conclusive proof” that Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 was hijacked, which would explain why its transponder stopped working and no distress call was made prior to its disappearance. But authorities still don’t know where the plane is, or why it would have been targeted, or who is responsible.
In Brief is authored by the staff, board, and contributors of the Northwest Progressive Institute, a netroots powered strategy center working to raise America's quality of life through innovative research and imaginative advocacy.
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