Nine killed as small jet crashes on Florida street | Hacker News Reader

Nine killed as small jet crashes on Florida street

bbc.co.uk

13 pointsm4tthumphrey24 comments

The plane came down like a missile, nothing left but a crater.

Some speculation has been icing on the plane, since it looks like it entered a small storm cell. It originally flew around a larger storm going on, but just around the time it started losing altitude, it had gone through a small cell. Then when the plane goes back into colder area, rapid ice formation happens due to supercooling.

It's amazing that it seems like only the people on board lost their lives. The crash looked devastating, and into a fairly high population (residential, on a holiday weekend) area.

It also seems very disrespectful to me how the ATC audio has been published. I haven't listened because of how many people I've seen saying they found it haunting or regret listening. Could you imagine that circulating if the pilot was your family? If that was how you found out? I get that all the news outlets want to be the one to report and capture attention, but these are real people. My heart goes out to the families.

> It also seems very disrespectful to me how the ATC audio has been published

Most of the ATC exchange is being recorded and published by volunteers 24/7. It's not "published" in a sense it's never been secret - there is no encryption or any special encoding. You only need AM radio with a specific frequency band to listen to it.

It's being published in the sense that news outlets are redistributing it. They are under no obligation to redistribute it. They are doing it because a) they believe it will drive more traffic to their site, and b) they don't care how disrespectful it is to redistribute.

It was "published" in that sense before the news outlets got a hold of it, by individuals without a profit motive - the news outletsprobably wouldn't have even known to look. I disagree that this is a bad things. The dead and their families are not the only ones who matter when it comes to the operation of deadly machinery and the recording helps people get an idea before the NTSB is done with their investigation (which will take a long time). Besides, the family and friends of the pilots might even get some closure from the recording and get to hear their loved ones final words - and if they don't then no one is forcing them to listen to it. It's a recoding of a professional communication showing someone who runs into a problem that escalates very quickly and who then realizes that there are no more options shorly before the impact.

You just described the ethics of the mainstream media.

They have none. Money is more important.

Hard to argue that the BBC isn't mainstream, yet the article we're discussing contains only selected extracts from the transcript and doesn't link to the audio.

Also hard to argue the BBC hasn't had ethics problems

And for all that, they still managed to refrain from distributing the audio.

Nihilist complaints about "the MSM" aren't a productive way to deal with such ghoulishness.

It looked like a ballistic missile. Straight down into the pavement.

If it had been more horizontal, there would likely have been casualties on the ground as well.

I suspect they release the audio, ironically, to calm airline passengers letting them know it was a unique situation.

More info:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/dramatic-footage-shows-pri...

Analysis of Miami NEXRAD radar shows the Learjet 60 (N722BD) entered a thunderstorm core near Wellington at about 12:48 PM ET, just before it crashed in Palm Beach County.

At 35,000 feet, radar echoes around the jet jumped to 34 dBZ, with a 52 dBZ core below it and storm tops near 47,000 feet. Tracking data shows the jet climbed about 450 feet inside the core, then went into a spiraling dive and crashed 76 seconds later.

The ATC wasn't "released" by anyone, ATC communications are open and in the clear, anyone can listen in, and there are many individual and companies that record all ATC conversations and host them online as datasets.

All civil aviation radio is by default strictly done over open channels in order to co ordinate with all of the other aircraft and ground control, and is often the only comunication possible in an emergency, and is always monitored and 'published' in order to co ordinate emergency responses, in the air, on the ground, and can often serve as the only real evidence as to what happened. The other part is that it also serves to keep wild speculation to a minimum. Your or anybody elses fucking feelings will never be meaningfully effected by this standard procedure, these people died publicly and it was witnessed, it's obsene to attempt to then 'privitise' that. Wanaknow whats worse, I'll tell ya, these people had the option to blast strait up through and OVER the iceing conditions, but were saving fuel by flying lower and counting on the 'de ice' equipent normally only use for 'decent into weather' and landing, or thats what I am gathering, others with better knowledge will have completly picked it apart.

You put 'published' in quotes because you thought it was a weird word to use for radio broadcasts. Did you maybe stop and consider that I wasn't talking about radio broadcasts?

It's actually okay for people to have their feelings hurt about seeing people literally explode and listening to their final moments as they know what's about to happen.

That doesn't sound right, the optimal fuel altitude for the Lear 60 is above 40,000 feet (flying higher generally has better fuel efficiency because of less wind resistance from thinner air, up to the point where the engine and wings lose thrust/lift.)

More likely they were following a standard flight route for the area.

The gp's point that deviating around the storm when it was apparent would have been a decision that cost more fuel. That there could have been theoretical routes that avoided the storm and not cost more fuel is useless hindsight.

> It's amazing that it seems like only the people on board lost their lives.

Yes, honestly this was the first thing I thought when hearing about it.

Even in south Florida, a very small percentage of land is occupied by a human at any given point in time. The crater is quite small because the plane just went almost straight in.

I also noticed the quickly released ATC audio and also didn't listen to it.

I saw an interview with the son of a 9/11 victim last month. One of the things he said was: "anybody can see my father die on youtube". Really stuck with me.

Flying is such an interesting thing to me. I'm still frightened every time I get in a plane

Unequivocally the safest way to travel, statistically, but when things go this wrong it is more or less impossible for anyone on board to survive. I'm just thankful it didn't hit a building or anything

I couldn't bring myself to listen to the audio

> but when things go this wrong it is more or less impossible for anyone on board to survive

That's not true, crash survival is actually higher than one might naively expect. It's just that the more violent crashes get the most exposure - and even for those you can get lucky like the one guy who walked of the Air India crash last year.

And to even have a crash at all will usually need more than one thing to go wrong.

Private jets have a different safety record than commercial airlines though.

I too have been unable to listen or watch much. I saw a clip of the initial impact and the post-impact destruction. This stuff is rare to witness, and frankly the world has enough trauma to deal with already. We don't need to gruesome images of the aftermath distributed around the web. I'm also unable to listen to the audio. It's just not for me.

Yesterday I saw some post on Threads where some guy vibe coded / recreated the flight path and ATC / pilot convo moment by moment in 3D. Incredibly poor taste, and I'm disappointed this is considered 'normal'.

There is nothing wrong with people trying to understand what happened.

I'm no expert but the early "reports" are saying ice and turbulence. The video and ATC recording is haunting.

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