RE: Hamas recruits baby bombers

It’s very dais to see these kind of photo’s. That region of the world will stay a hot spot for times to come. hope this will never be a reality.

regards,

jw

RE: 2006 WC is already ours

Sorry old chap, I’m affraid that we are going to get what we deserved in 1974 ;-).

regards,

jw

RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

Russian Jet, Plane Collide in Germany
Tue Jul 2, 4:08 AM ET
By OLIVER SCHMALE, Associated Press Writer

UEBERLINGEN, Germany (AP) – A Russian passenger jet filled with children collided with a cargo plane late Monday over southern Germany in a fireball, scattering flaming wreckage for about 20 miles, officials and a travel agent said. There were believed to be no survivors.

A Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154 from Moscow was bound for Barcelona, Spain, when it hit a two-pilot Boeing 757 from the DHL delivery service, said Wolfgang Wenzel, a police spokesman in the German city of Tuebingen. The planes were believed to have been flying at an altitude of about 36,000 feet when they collided.

At Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, Bashkirian representative Sergei Rybanov said 47 children, 10 adults and 12 crew were aboard the Russian plane. They flew into Moscow’s Sheretmeyevo airport on Saturday, but missed their connection to Spain and requested that the airline organize a special flight to Barcelona, he said Tuesday.

In Moscow, Tatiana Ostapenko said her Soglasiye Tourist company helped organize the charter trip and that there were 44 children on board accompanied by five adults.

“We are in shock,” Ostapenko said.

The planes came down near Ueberlingen on the northern shore of Lake Constance, which borders Switzerland and Austria. The area is some 135 miles south of Frankfurt.

A German official said the collision happened when the Tu-154 pilot was asked by Swiss air traffic controllers to descend but did not respond to the request. The DHL pilot tried to change course, but it was too late to avoid the crash, said Ulrich Mueller, the Baden-Wuerttemberg state environment minister.

Search crews found the Tupolev’s flight data recorder, he said.

Witnesses said they heard a noise like thunder and saw a fireball erupt in the night sky, and three large pieces of wreckage plunged to the ground. Scattered fires were sparked in the rural area, but there were no casualties on the ground, authorities said.

The crash happened a few minutes after Swiss air traffic controllers took over both planes from their German colleagues — a handover illustrating the fragmented nature of European airspace.

Swiss controllers asked the Russian plane’s pilot several times to descend without getting a reply. By the time the pilot reacted, the cargo plane received an automatic cockpit warning that it was on a collision course and descended too, leading to the crash, said Anton Maag, a spokesman for Swiss controllers.

“The problem was that the Russian plane did not respond immediately,” Maag said in Zurich. “The descent was begun very late. The double descent led to both planes flying at the same altitude and hitting each other.”

“At such an altitude, it would be a wonder if anyone survived,” said Wenzel, the police spokesman.

Dirk Diestel, 47, was changing his child’s diaper shortly before midnight when he looked up through a skylight and saw a huge fireball in the sky.

“Immediately I thought that something horrible had happened,” he said. When he went outside, a landing gear was lying a few feet from his home.

Axel Gietz, head of corporate affairs at DHL in Brussels, Belgium, confirmed that the company’s plane went down in the collision, killing the British pilot, Paul Phillips, and his Canadian co-pilot, Brant Campioni. A German air controller, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the DHL plane was going from Bahrain to Brussels.

Hundreds of rescuers worked through the night locating wreckage and bodies, while helicopters flew overhead looking for burning or other visible parts of the planes. By daybreak, rescue workers had recovered 11 bodies from smoking wreckage after the two planes collided at 11:43 p.m.

Bashkirian Airlines, which is headquartered in Ufa, the capital of the southern Russian republic of Bashkortostan, has eight Tu-154s in its fleet of 39 Soviet-designed planes. It mainly serves Russia and former Soviet republics, with some charter flights to other destinations.

The three-engine Tu-154, first put into commercial service in 1972, is the workhorse of Russia’s domestic airlines and widely used throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as in China.

A Tu-154 crashed in the Siberian city of Irkutsk last July, killing all 143 aboard. Another crashed on takeoff from Irkutsk in 1994, killing 124 people. The plane reportedly was overloaded.

A Tu-154 belonging to China Southwest Airlines crashed in China in 1999, killing all 61 people aboard. A German-owned Tu-154 collided with a U.S. Air Force C-141 off the coast of Namibia in 1998, killing 33 people, and in 1997 a Tajik Tu-154 crashed en route to the United Arab Emirates, killing 85.

Collisions in the air between large aircraft are extremely rare, especially at the high cruising altitudes where Monday’s crash reportedly occurred.

Most aircraft carry transponders, devices that relay a plane’s identification, altitude and speed to ground controllers. Controllers use this information to track aircraft and keep them a safe distance from each other. In addition, equipment on many aircraft can read the transponder signals of nearby planes, painting an electronic map to show pilots the aircraft around them.

Many planes also carry collision avoidance equipment that can automatically pull the plane away from an impending collision, or sound an alarm and tell the pilot which way to turn to avoid a crash. Transponders must be regularly calibrated and checked to make sure they are functioning properly.

RE: Time for vacation

Have fun in America :-).
Must be something you really are looking forward to. But I must say I look forward to your return, and not alone for your comments but for the simple and selfish reason that I’m going tree days latter :P.

regards,

jw

RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

It’s always a tragedy if someone dies in aviation or anywhere else for that matter. My thought goes to all the family on board of the two a/c.

The air traffic controller did command the Tu twice to change altitude but he didn’t react to it. So in the plenary report the Tu was at fold. Probably the Russian crew misunderstood the air traffic control. Very said but these things happen.
Derby from the mid air coalition was found in a 32 km radius and said to put some houses on fire, nobody on the ground was hurt though.
Wasn’t there an incident a few years back of an other coalition between two airlines in the skies above India?

regards,

Jeroen

RE: UN financing

Saunon,

my only objective was to put those numbers into prospective. Clearly your post was meant as a balance against my post on the The Hague invasion act.
Í don’t have anything against Americans or the country, but if you put the numbers down then you must be fair. The way you just put them there you might suggest that everyone should pay the same no metre the size of the country, or, even worse, you want to send out the massage Look at America and how good it is to the world.

I don’t have an opinion whether the US should pay more or less. 25% of the budget seems to me too much for one country, indeed influence et cetera. I think it should be objective, with all kinds of parameters in it, GNP and inhabitants among other things.

I hope this clarifies my massage, sorry I was a bit vague.

best regards,

jw