i’m sorry. i mean no disrespect but there are some very strange things about this plane crash.

1. yesterday they said they found the black boxes of the plane, and it was a matter of recovering them, and it depended whether they were inside the plane or not, and was the wreckage in a trench, etc. there were a lot of caveats.

“The boxes were found approximately 10 kilometers (six miles) west of the airport, 1,300 meters (4,265 feet) below the surface of the sea,” an army spokesman told AFP. The Lebanese army said in a statement issued before midday Thursday that the Ocean Alert, a civilan vessel, was trying to find the Ethiopian plane’s flight recorders after the U.S. navy destroyer the USS Ramage detected new signals from the black boxes.

UPDATE: friday night: boxes now three miles farther out and a couple hundred feet deeper. source gee, one more adjustment like that and they’ll be unrecoverable.

Information Minister Tareq Mitri said late Thursday that the black boxes were about 14 kilometers (9 miles) off the coast at a depth of 1,500 meters (4,920 feet) and in an area of seven square kilometers (2.7 square miles).

An army official had earlier said the US navy destroyer USS Ramage, part of an international search operation, had picked up the signals approximately 10 kilometers west of Beirut airport at a depth of 1,300 meters.

Ocean Alert is equipped to access objects 2000 meters (6,561 feet) below sea level.

UPDATE: friday night: Ocean Alert leaving for a time, logistical reasons, to be replaced by a French vessel. source

The Ocean Alert, a privately-operated U.S. civilian vessel stationed in Cyprus, will leave Lebanon tomorrow for logistic reasons related to refueling its tanks and it will return later to continue its mission, LBC TV network reported on Friday.
Ocean Alert will be replaced by a French ship until it returns from Cyprus, according to the report.

The report of LBC TV network added: “If the black boxes (from the crashed Ethiopian plane) are located outside of what is left of the plane’s body, then there is a possibility to send a submarine — that can pull weights ranging from 150 to 200 kilograms from the sea bottom – in order to pull out the boxes. But if the boxes exist inside of what is left of the plane’s body, then the search-and-rescue teams will have to use submarines with bigger capabilities – not available at the moment — in case the plane’s debris weighs more than 200 kilograms.”

The Ocean Alert is equipped to reach objects 2000 meters (6,561 feet) below sea level.

Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi has earlier said: “We expect to have them sometime today.”

He told AFP that the body of the Boeing 737-800 had yet to be located four days after the tragedy.

Aridi said that while search teams had picked up the flight data recorder signals, it remained unclear whether the boxes were still inside the body of the Boeing 737-800, which plunged into the Mediterranean on Monday with 90 people on board.

“If the black boxes are not in the body of the plane, it is easier to access them,” Aridi said. “But if they are still inside the plane, this will necessitate another procedure completely.”

The boxes were located in a seafloor trench and their recovery may take time, a defense ministry official told AFP.

more @ naharnet

2. well now that didn’t work out. no boxes yet.  it’s apparently very, very difficult to find these boxes. they keep throwing depth numbers around like maybe there’s some limit to how deep they can go, and i’m starting to get the impression that the boxes will be unrecoverable or lost in some trench. maybe they should call James Cameron seeing as he was able to reach the titanic two miles underwater to make a gazillion dollars on a hollywood movie, and ask him how he did that. so we still can’t find out what really happened, and why the pilot made that strange turn was he avoiding something? and the strangest statement yet …keep reading…..

The two ships Ocean Alert and USS Ramage tasked with finding the black boxes of the doomed Ethiopian plane are receiving signals emitted by them, but the exact location has not yet been determined, Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi said Thursday, stressing that operations are underway to precisely locate the boxes and pull them from the sea. The operation of pulling out the black boxes requires using the submarine specialized in this field existing on board of the civilian rescue vessel, Ocean Alert, which had detected the whereabouts of the black boxes through special sonar equipment able to access objects 2000 meters (6,561 feet) below sea level.

On Wednesday, the situation room operating under the command of the Lebanese Army received information from the U.S. navy destroyer USS Ramage about detecting new signals from the black boxes which were reportedly found approximately 10 kilometers (six miles) west of the airport, 1,300 meters (4,265 feet) below the surface of the sea. The boxes were located in a seafloor trench and their recovery may take time, a defense ministry official told AFP.

After Cabinet’s extraordinary session Thursday evening under PM Saad Hariri, Information Minister Tarek Mitri said “the black boxes had been detected at a depth ranging from 200 to 1400 meters below the surface of the sea.”

Mitri added that the submarine which will be sent after locating the place is for taking pictures and determining the exact position of the boxes as another submarine will be used to pull them from the sea. On the other hand, Health Minister Mohammed Jawad Khalife declared Thursday that the DNA genetic diagram of the plane victims had been completed as testing had identified the bodies of the two victims Anna Mohammed Abes and Ali Ahmed Jaber whose body was handed over to his family to be buried Friday in his hometown Nabatiyeh.

Khalife confirmed that Rafik Hariri state hospital had received many body parts and that tests revealed they do not belong to humans. [is this a typo? what the....?? ]

yeah. i don’t know what to make of that. more @ naharnet

3. well we had heard numbers like 34 bodies recovered as of Monday. but now the number is 14. ?????????

BEIRUT — An Ethiopian Airlines plane carrying 90 people caught fire and crashed into the sea minutes after taking off from Beirut early Monday, setting off a frantic search as passenger seats, baby sandals and other debris washed ashore. At least 34 bodies were recovered.

http://www.northjersey.com/news/012510_Ethiopian_jet_crash_deaths_rise_as_23_bodies_found.html

All 83 passengers and seven crew are presumed dead. Only 14 bodies, including those of two toddlers, and body parts have been found so far.

http://www.naharnet.com/domino/tn/NewsDesk.nsf/getstory?openform&71C3E6947C11EA1CC22576BA002E9AFA

4. also, isn’t it a little strange that, given that only 14 bodies have been identified so far, and this has required DNA testing because the bodies are burned and/or dismembered, that Hassan Tajideen was found and identified and buried so quickly? that just seems super extra odd to me, given the incredible difficulty we hear now about finding the body of the plane and the rest of the passengers and the black boxes. Tajideen was buried on Tuesday, but good luck finding out any info. there’s no coverage of it.

Al-Liwaa also pointed to Hizbullah’s noteworthy presence in the funeral of one of the plane victims identified as Hassan Tajeddine in the southern town of Hanaway.

more @ naharnet

totally, totally bizarre.

5. UPDATE: answers lead to more questions…

The eight identified victims from the Ethiopian doomed plane were business class passengers, hence they were seated in the plane’s front, knowing that the business class seats count 16 out of 138 seats available on the plane, An Nahar daily reported on Saturday.

The business class compartment had also additional three passengers, hence totaling the passengers at 14 added to Ethiopian security guard whose body has been found without being officially identified, knowing that his wallet and gun were found with the body. According to aviation sources, the security guard is usually situated in the front part of the plane.

An Nahar added that the victim Hasan Tajeddine, a businessman, occupied the seat A1 located behind the cockpit, knowing that the plane’s first door is located between the cockpit and the seat A1, and that Tajeddine used to choose this seat for its nearness to the door. His body was found with no major deformations.

The report suggested that the head of the plane — including the business class compartment and the toilet allocated for this section — had been detached from its body, knowing that the civil defense members had previously found the remains of one of the plane’s toilets near Ramlet al-Bayda shore, and that the seats recovered until today are mostly blue, indicating they belong to the aforementioned compartment.

Two bodies for Ethiopian hostesses exist at Rafik Hariri state hospital, according to medical sources.

Following the same analysis, the passengers of the economy class totaled 66, situated in the second part of the plane – the seats starting from row 11 to row 33, knowing that each row had six seats.

Hence, the passengers of economy class are still confined to their seatbelts inside the biggest part of the plane at the sea bottom. The probability for their bodies to float on the surface is related to the unfastening of the seatbelt, according to the report.

more @ naharnet

LOGIC BOMB: well, let’s see here. if the head of the plane detached from the body, then the cockpit, which is with the head of the plane, should be where they found the recovered bodies.

seeing as the black boxes would be in the cockpit, they should be recoverable too.

and seeing as tajideen was sitting right behind the cockpit, and his body is not burnt, then we can presume that the black boxes would also be in good condition and near the area where tajideen was recovered. NO? does that all not follow?????

why would the black boxes be in the trench with the body of the plane? that makes no sense.

2/11/10 — i was wrong. there is a data collection unit in the cockpit but the data goes to the black boxes, which are in the tail end of the plane.