snowmman

Hey Ckret, Even though later papers on skyjacking kind of discredited Hubbard and the profile he created in the early '70s, have you read the Hubbard profile? a summary is available online in Google Books. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on whether some of the classic thinking on skyjackers might apply here, or are you still just thinking Cooper's thinking like a bank robber?

interesting. I was reading a news article in the mid-50's about a guy in a military jet who crashed into a ski mountain...it was sad, his instruments were out and he was relying on the ATC guys, and they guided him right into the mountain. Then the ATC guys blamed radar echo, and had the gall to say the guy was partly to blame cause he didn't have much experience, and most experienced pilots would know you have to take the ATC information with a grain of salt, and why was he going so fast anyhow.... History is always written by the survivors I guess. There really is no such thing as "fact", is there? Everything is colored by the observer.

Sluggo when we talk about the pilots being able to see the suburbs or whatnot, and the distance implied, have we all been kind of visualizing they're on a straight line path to Portland...doesn't this "what they can see" change a bit if they were really on the curvy path. I think you mentioned this before, and the '71 air map confirms it...that there was less development in Vancouver then...so a curvy path might make you feel like you were more in the sticks also. I'm thinking on the curvy path...that it "feels" like you're farther from Portland... you see what I mean? at an extreme level, think of someone flying S's coming in to PDX and what they would describe.

Here's the same thing (you can see the black path) except I'm over Portland, at 17000 ft, roughly. looks cool heh! you can see PDX runways there. Hey reminds me...I can actually create a flyby in Google Earth. If we agree on flight path, we can actual have GE fly it, at 10,000 ft...looking down at whatever angle you like. I'm looking back up N here.. (attached)

ok, I guess I'm just trying to provoke Sluggo a bit here, but we'll see what he says :) I'm no pilot. just playing with Google Earth. So by definition I know nothing here. So I took the V23 kmz stuff Sluggo created (that I got from him way back when we were talking about money find location) and vortacs and whatever, and put that in the '71 overlay kmz I created above. Remember the '71 map is hand drawn by who knows who, maybe at the time of the hijack. It's the one on the newspaper web sites, where Carr showed them a map (not the '72 map) The hand written times on that map may be skewed to the times we normally consider in transcripts. I don't know. It's the times written on that map. In the attached jpg, that map is semi-transparent, but you can see the black flight path from the pencil on that map. Everything else is Google Earth. Someone made a joke way back when, about a pilot driving like a drunken sailor or something. What's interesting is the big curve around the Battleground vortac. It's the furthest discrepancy from the V23 indicated path. It seems to be ~3.5NM miles E of the V23 centerline. Sluggo has said something about PDX not being involved in a tower control situation thru this airspace. So what's up here? Did 305 really swing wide? Is the '71 map just wrong? Does the airway cover 4NM from the center? If so, I guess the flight path is within the defined airway. If the wind was coming from the south, Scott shouldn't have been fighting a wind that would blow him SE? Maybe the wind wasn't from the south, although my NOAA map says that. Maybe it shifted by the evening? I attached a jpg so you don't have to go into GE. Note that by the Columbia crossing at PDX, the flight path is dead-on V23..you can almost not see the black mark under the pink V23 line.

okay, it's not a day at snow's place unless he taunts Ckret. Everyone knows why Ckret thinks the DZ was supposed to be SEATAC: Ckret thinks there's better coffee in WA than OR. I'm going to eventually have two newspaper articles up on my wall: one with Agent H. professing knowledge of Cooper impact speeds based on some whacky wind data. And the other quoting Agent C. with the Coffee+Rubber Band Theory. Actually, come to think of it, I would probably research that article if there was one.. Never mind. JOKE! FUNNY! :)

I guess if you jumped near PDX, you could just walk back to a car and solve the issue of how Cooper got to PDX initially. (drive home). what about flying? Pearson Field is an interesting little airport. it's at 45°37'21.21"N 122°39'20.79"W walking distance to PDX? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_Field_Airport flying your own private plane to and from the hijack would be interesting. You could walk to PDX. Then if you jump near Portland/Vancouver, you could make your way back and fly off pretty easily? I remember hearing FBI checking private airfields up around Amboy/La Center/View. Evergreen Field apparently another although more of a hike. Closed in 2006. 45.62N 122.53W can still see it in GE.

orange1: in my last SAGE/F106 post, there was info that suggested F106 intercepts may have been very dependent on visual intercept under the mountains/low altitude/radar distance from McChord conditions. (given '71 technology in place..see the description of the radar on the F106's). Be interesting if people with more knowledge on this might chime in. so lights out would help avoid that? I guess both theories support "knowledge" thinking of some kind. The transcript clearly states that Cooper requested to fly with gear down and flaps at 15 deg. (and, btw, that after underway all lights to be turned out in aircraft - which sounds like someone familiar with a night jump?)

I always wanted to do this to see what it looked like. Here it is. I finally switched to my bigger monitor rather than my laptop and Google Earth is much more impressive. I took the FBI '71 flight path hand drawn map, and imported into GE and stretched and rotated it untill a number of landmarks aligned. The Columbia, various highways, Mt St Helen's peak (although a bit blown now) Lake Merwin. The paper map wasn't photographed perfectly, so there's a little nonalignment I can't fix, but it's pretty good looking. Then I adjusted the transparency and added some pushpins on the time markers "on that map"...these time markers may be skewed compared to how we currently mark time. This has nothing to do with Sluggo's work, and I have no idea how the '71 map was created by the FBI. I believe it was handdrawn at some point (the heavy line) If you're a GE whiz you'll be able to adjust the transparency of the map. I left it about half way. (the short decription if you want: open up 71 flight path.kmz in your Temporary Places,. find "71 flight path overlay", right click it and select Properties, and you'll get the Transparency slider) Just clicking on the .kmz after you save it should load it into GE for you. Ingram money find location there too. the usual feedback is encouraged. I used the "zoomed-in" map that was available at one of the newspapers. If Ckret could scan a better version of the '71 map in the area around portland, I could redo a better one. Maybe not worth it if we don't know the data behind the '71 line drawing.

This may have been obvious to everyone, but I just realized it. I like to belabor the obvious to make sure we all agree. I was reading an article from way back, that said the lite went on, and it implied that meant the stairs were fully extended. I thought, well that's wrong, and was musing about whether FBI agents back then mentally connected it that way, or the writer. Then I realized WE KNOW FOR SURE it's wrong, because of the 1996 case where the stairs opened in flight. They had aft stair lite on in that case. Also the '95 case where I didn't grab all the info, but it was while the plane was landing. i.e. we have testimony that tells us about inflight stair opening to just 2' (or less?) and the lite being on. In the 1996 case, we know the stairs opened like 2' based on the aero.com summary, which is confirmed by news reports from that day. So, my thinking is, the lite is on when the stair is unlatched. And as we know, too much air pressure will keep it closed (Cooper's complaint about getting the stairs down was after the aft lite when on, correct?) So: in terms of timeline, the "aft lite on" message provides no data to us, other than leading to other things. When the plane is on the ground, and the stair deployment is handled by gravity, the aft stair lite on might be quickly followed by full deployment. So: I suspect there is nothing, other than maybe oscillations that tells us when the stairs are open far enough to jump. People may say "what about the placard in Toutle". Well maybe aft lite on is useful for resolving that. We can say the placard should not have gone out before the aft lite on..It's small enough that it may have gone out thru a 2' or less gap. (edit) Maybe we can say that since oscillations were not reported at initial "aft lite on" that means that stair opening to just 2' is not enough to create the reported stair oscillations. So it was not a simple depressurization event. Although, we're not sure we got a 2' opening at aft light on. It is interesting that there's a substantial time gap between aft light on and oscillations. I think it justifies the Pucker Walk delay idea Ckret initiated.

I was quizzing Sluggo on what kind of data might be on the flight recorder that was used in conjunction with the radar data to generate the '72 map, cause I couldn't envision how the radar data could be tweaked. He replied with a list of probable events. I just noticed the last he listed was * Time of each radio transmission either to or from air traffic control. If this was true, and the data was available somewhere, it would eliminate some imprecision in the transcript log for the exact time of various radio transmissions. If we also knew how skewed the FDR time was relative to the transcript time, which we're using as the "golden" standard I guess?

some random pics I had gathered up. First is a black/white satellite image that includes the money find location at the top. I like it because the channel area at the top of Caterpillar Island is almost choked off. Might give georger some thoughts on water flow/eddy currents. Also, I think you can intuit water depth a little right near the money find, compared to the rest of the Columbia. Also note labelling of current man made structures. You can see all the houseboats and dock stuff in the channel in the Kadows Marina area. The current Shillapoo Boat Ramp (public access I believe) is also labelled. The lower channel is labelled "do not attempt passage" But I found a hand drawn map people used for an annual get together, that shows "with care" you can navigate that channel if you do it correctly. (plus I like how it looks like a treasure map ! :) I included that also...to stimulate georger's thinking.The Quinn's Cove stuff is the south end of caterpillar island. Remember, it's not the money find location for those but maybe relevant. Interesting note on left side of the hand written map that says tides affect the water levels and currents. Surprising, if true, this far from the ocean. Again this is current. Not sure what 1971 looked like. (edit) georger had wondered about the opposite shore from the money find. You can see that Reeder Beach (the RV park) is over there. It's used a lot and has been there a long time (pre Cooper I believe). My prior post included commentary on when spoils were last used on that beach ('60s?). One can surmise that the heavy human traffic would have served as a "excavation crew" over the years to discover anything buried as shallow as the Ingram find was? Just guessing.

I'm thinking about how we won't be able to resolve the data to a fine enough resolution, and rather than getting into endless debates that can't be resolved, we can target a goal that captures all information... 1) a jump window that's 100% confidence..i.e. a window where it's guaranteed Cooper had to jump somewhere between these two points. This will be a wide window. I don't even know what it would be, right now. That's wrong. I should know. 2) A window that represents a best attempt at narrowing the window....i.e. narrow it until everyone starts yelling NO!...so it's a gut check window of some sort...fuzzily defined by "seems right" Now if we have two methods or predicting jump zone, then that creates 4 windows. I think it's important to resolve this before grinding the numbers. I think a big "human performance" issue, back in '71, to use Sluggo's thinking, was not tracking confidence intervals along with the numbers. So all numbers were considered black and white when they were transferred to personnel who didn't know where the numbers came from. By including some notion of confidence intervals, we can propagate "quality" along with each number we use, so if we re-calculate with the number down the pipeline, we can see how the re-calculate should affect a range prediction. Most of the calcs are linear, so there's no strange effects, but hey! I'm waiting for someone to introduce calculus here!

here's a nice video of the SAGE WDC display and the vacuum tube stuff..(from the Computer Museum) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7ssZyRl6MU cool! now you're tracking flight 305 too! hey they show the cigarette lighter/ashtray ..

nice video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4IztV7M3jI you can get a feel for the typing speed of the asr-33... and how it automatically types (it's hooked to a computer in this case, but doesn't matter) Hey close you're eyes and maybe you're at FLT OPS on 11/24/71 with the TTY rattling away. I had forgotten about the bells! brings back memories. Dinging the bell on like a decwriter used to be our fun...you could get the whole terminal room dinging.

I actually have a hazy memory of a TTY device back in college. I think we used it for printing output on job status or printer status, in the local terminal room for the mainframe. It was always chattering away. they had round keys that went straight up and down? it wasn't like typewriters. Hard to type fast. I seem to remember a yellow roll of paper web says asr-33 was most common. attached some pics

re: no modem excellent point (if true!) Sluggo. The interesting thing from all this, is that for short messages, the delay may be

I was just thinking that the "XXX" sequence used to indicate a typo in the transcript can tell us something about how this whole TTY thing worked. The keyboardist would use "XXX" when he "saw" that he made a mistake. He wouldn't just visualize "mistake" in his mind. So the local TTY console has keyboard and a roll of paper. This is the local transcript, but is probably not the transcript we have, cause as Sluggo notes, the one we have has at least one interspersed message not connected to NORJAK. It's unclear whether the local TTY console is generating the timestamp and date info when the operator hits send, and includes it as part of the message. GUESSING: I guess not, since it would then be skewed by the transmission delay at the final printer it gets sent to. Then you would have messages at the final printer that potentially have out of sequence timestamps. I'm thinking of the case of many different keyboard guys sending messages from different places. So, let's say the timestamp is created at the final printer when it receives a message. Then the "delay" is how long it takes to type the whole message locally, hit send, and have it be transmitted at the TTY baud rate, probably 45 baud to the final printer. (maybe 60 wpm) So the delays from utterance on radio would be 1) mental cognition of audio to fingers 2) typing till a full message is created 3) hit send and see TTY baud rate limited transfer 4) it starts printing at the final printer. When the full message is printed a timestamp is printed. This seems like a variable length process to me, so working back from the timestamp to the radio audio output, it seems we need to allow for a range of time, depending on message length, errors, and possible variable TTY transfer delays due to congestion? It's so fuzzy, that rather than analyzing each message, we maybe could just assign a range of time. But saying "1 minute" doesn't seem perfect to me.

I think Sluggo created a scenario where he could predict the skew between radio transmissions and the arrival of text on paper somehow. He tried to explain it a couple posts ago, but I'm not sure he really knows what devices were being used. If there were rtty baud rate limited behavior (like mechanical printing speed after hitting send or something) between keyboard and paper, then that's one question. If the timestamp was generated at the keyboard device or the printer device that's another. If the keyboard and printer device was one device, that's another. Sluggo seemed confident of all of this, but I didn't really understand why. (edit) it seems like maybe he's just using a constant delay of 1 minute that the FBI came up with. In that case I would say the FBI number is probably just a guess, and should really be a range. Could it be somewhere between 0 and 2 minutes? dunno. Could it actually vary between messages? maybe..without understanding what's causing the delay, we can't understand if it varies. So I don't see where he knows enough to say that the timestamp gives perfect precision between messages either. We could start with getting more data on the RTTY stuff from ckret maybe. (edit) I mean if the timestamp is at the end of the messages, and the length of the messages vary, as well as the typing speed that created them, then the time between the first utterance, and the timestamp, has to vary per message?

hey georger, I don't understand the new timeline either. I guess I just would like to see Sluggo move his red'ed 8:11 period to whatever the current consensus period is for probable jump. Maybe at a 10%-90% confidence interval. Or pick a confidence interval. Whatever makes him happy. To have a 100% confidence interval with the data measurement techniques we have, we probably need to use something like 20 minute window for oscillations to jump. It'll be interesting to see what data Sluggo decides is valid for this period. None of the other data matters much without this period. So Sluggo needs to put something? So we're being bad scientists and swagging stuff, but Sluggo ignores that? If there's no current consensus period, then he should remove his 8:11 period and just say "we haven't agreed on a jump point" Because Ckret just told us that the interview data is likely misinterpreted. So Sluggo has no data. We have to agree on a new interpretation somehow. We could Rock/Paper/Scissors? :)

Hi quade. So you're suggesting that there were oscillations all the way to Reno then? Ckret: what does the testimony say? Did the pressure oscillations continue, or did they stop at some point. I thought the pictures showed that after the bump the stairs stayed closed. (edit) They must have lowered when they landed, cause they got sparks. So "no air pressure" -> they fall open...."air pressure" --> stay closed? (edit) Also: if there's no wind rush like you say, that means there's no turbulent/chaotic wind flow, so the air pressure/flow across the stair should be relatively constant? Ckret should be able to straighten us out on this from the experiment results. So the plywood flapping analogy is not a valid one? Yeah, I do get misty eyed when it's a reasonable guess I might die. I don't if I know I won't die. Two different things. Cause you got to resolve it all before you go. Being misty eyed in the middle doesn't help success.

There's been some theorizing on how long from oscillations to bump. Everyone of all skill levels can chime in here with good thoughts, I think, because we can describe the experiment pretty well? (or describe it the way you see it) ...I'm guessing everyone's time estimate might be pretty similar, because it might be more of a primal human thing..since it's at a point where prior experience just don't apply? It's virgin territory. I've never jumped. Here's my guess at the critical period from oscillations (stairs finally open) to bump (jump) You're Cooper. You're finally at the climax. Finally the pilot has slowed the plane so the stairs seem to crack open a bit when you weight them, like Ckret says. There's no manual you could have read about what's going to happen next. You're trying to spot where you going to jump, maybe hoping to see some lights. You're holding on with two hands at first cause you're not sure if you're going to be sucked out or what. Heck you waste 30 seconds just absorbing the wind rush at the moment. After all this mental stress controlling others, it's all about to be over. You've got some stuff that's not tied to you you want to toss out. You go out the first time holding on with two hands..You come back and grab some stuff and toss it. You nervously double check all the snaps and buckles and slap the rip handle so you're sure where it is. You're thinking "Did I forget anything".."Is this a really bad idea" "Should I wait some more" "Is it going to get better or get worse" and you are ALONE. There's no one to give the thumbs up to, no one last human face to look into for reassurance. It's dark inside, it's dark outside. Hell, imagine you've got nerves of steel and butt muscles to match. I don't think that helps though, I think there's a minimum time that has to go by. How long does it take you to get all that done and get yourself down the stairs? It might be the last thing you do in life. I can see taking 5 minutes...heck even if it means you see the lights of portland going by......well landing near portland ain't so bad you think...as you work thru everything in your brain one last time. "Was it worth the risk"..."Yeah" you say to yourself. Yeah, I can see the Pucker Walk taking at least 5 minutes after initial oscillations. There's no reason to rush and die because you went too quickly. You've spent hours on this damn thing already. No matter what, on the Pucker Walk, Cooper knows he can't guarantee success from now on. He's going from in control to maybe just slightly in control. Hey we could actually get a bunch of jumpers to do this experiment. Just put them in a 727 at night with the lights out and say "Hey the stairs should open now if you weight them. Go back there alone, take this stuff and dump it out and go jump with the chute you got on that I gave you earlier. I'll be up front watching. Good luck" and time it.

Jo: did it suddently get real cold down there? Just kidding. I'm all forum'ed out for the day.

Quade never asked how I was able to read the forum even while I was banned. Obviously the "banning" technology is imperfect. What works as "banning" technology is social interaction or noninteraction. A nice reminder for us all as the world moves forward. It's all about the humans, not the technology. There's no such thing as superior technology winning a battle. All it provides is a time delay till the "more superior" technology is invented or used. Now I hope I don't get banned for this post.

The SAGE systems were pretty reliable even with all those vacuum tubes, because they had a second one always ready for hot standby. They were in use till early '80s, apparently even after ICBM's made them not as useful (not fast enough). The reliability of little bits of technology is not important, since you can always link "more" of it together to compensate for failure rates. The important thing is to be able to predict or measure failure rates. High reliability is useful for bringing down costs. That's why I don't care about someone's credentials. No one can be predictably 100% correct. Since humans are a part of the real world, the real world is always more complicated than what individuals or small groups can think about. Once you assume anyone can be wrong or intentially lying, then you focus on creating a process that will always give you a solution, as opposed to worrying about the individual pieces, which will always have known or unknown failure rates, regardless of best intentions.