Peculiar airliner crashes

Salon.com's Ask The Pilot column has some very interesting findings by Patrick Smith. For example, read about the two airliners that crashed within a two-day period.

"Indeed it seems probable that the near-simultaneous crashes of those two Russian airliners in late August was the work of suicide bombers. But I have to ask: excluding acts of terror, have there ever been two major accidents on the same day?

Not that I know of. Give me a two-day window, however, and I have a story. It's not my usual practice to sensationalize crashes, particularly those whose only claim to notoriety is a burst of coincidence, but what happened in Tokyo in 1966 is so enthrallingly peculiar that I can't resist...

On March 5 of that year, a Canadian Pacific (CP Air) DC-8 crashed on landing at Tokyo's Haneda airport. Arriving in heavy fog, the plane went low, struck a sea wall and burst into flames. Sixty-four of the 72 people on the jet were killed.

The next afternoon, a BOAC (precursor to British Airways) 707 carrying 124 people took off from the very same airport, bound for Hong Kong as part of a round-the-world service originating in London. Apparently to give passengers a nice view, the 707's captain, Bernard Dobsen, chose to make an unusual visual climb-out away from the published departure path and toward the summit of Mt. Fuji -- directly into an area of extreme turbulence and 70-knot winds. Approaching the peak, the plane hit a severe gust -- a so-called mountain wave -- and broke apart in midair, throwing wreckage over a 10-mile swath.

One of the most gruesomely ironic things I've ever seen is a newspaper photograph of the crashed CP Air DC-8. Behind the wreckage, the BOAC 707 is clearly visible, taxiing for takeoff on its own doomed flight."

Minority voter-intimidation tactics may determine the next president of the US?

As the November election gets near, many people are concerned about voter-intimidation campaigns against African-Americans to keep them at home and prevent them from voting. Philadelphia's 2003 mayoral election was also clouded by such incidents, and this November people are expecting similar things to occur.

"The voter-intimidation campaign that Republicans mounted in Philadelphia was not an anomaly. Instead, it marked a routine occurrence in American elections, a national scandal that rarely makes the front page. The sad fact is that voter-intimidation efforts aimed at minorities have been carried out in just about every major election over the past 20 years. The campaigns are almost always mounted by Republicans who aim to reduce the turnout of overwhelmingly Democratic minority voters at the polls. Now, in what's shaping up to be a razor-thin presidential election, Democrats across the country are pointing to what occurred in Philadelphia as an example of what they have to fear from Republicans this election year.

To Americans today, the idea that a major political party actively plans to disenfranchise minority voters may seem anachronistic; we'd like to believe that such tactics would no longer be tolerated in our nation. But over the last two decades, various arms of the Republican Party, or groups working for Republican candidates -- at the national, state and local levels -- have carried out well-documented projects designed to intimidate blacks and other minorities," writes Farhad Manjoo in Salon.com.

Despite efforts by many voter-rights groups some form of intimidation is likely to occur in this year's election.

"Many black voters themselves are intensely aware of the prospect of suppression tactics -- and they're ready for them, says Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP. "This is part of the folklore of black America, especially since 2000," he says. "Many people have tales to tell about this happening to people they know."

Still, despite the counter-intimidation efforts and increased awareness, elections experts still predict that suppression programs will likely succeed in turning away many voters at the polls this year. How many? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Nobody knows. But Bond notes that it took less than 600 votes in Florida to swing the election to Bush last time, and he believes that more than 600 African-American Gore voters were disenfranchised there. If this year's "election is as close as everyone believes it will be," Bond says, "and if they frighten just 600 voters away from the polls," minority voter-intimidation tactics may very well determine the next president of the United States," Manjoo writes.

Manjoo's article details intimdation of minorities through out 1980s and 1990s.

It will be interesting to read a report released by the People for the American Way Foundation and the NAACP in August about voter-intimidation efforts during the past two decades.

Another interesting read will be U.S. Commission on Civil Rights's report after they investigated efforts to disenfranchise blacks in Florida in 2000.