Thursday, December 03, 2009

Censored

Check out the Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010 at projectcensored.org. Stoner naturally gravitated to THIS story. (And, yes, I do realize that experienced pilots do crash their planes.)
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2 comments:

Bob Kemp said...

Interesting, if a bit paranoid, site. Speaking of plane crashes, check out this WIRED article (other than the sheer entertainment, it may offer some material for yr writing):
http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/08/gone-forever-what-does-it-take-to-really-disappear/all/1
One excerpt, related to a story posted here some months ago:

2:49 PM
Bob Kemp said...

Perhaps the most infamous recent faked death attempt, that of Indiana money manager Marcus Schrenker, involved a plan equally daring and bizarre. Accused of financial mismanagement, Schrenker, an amateur pilot, climbed into his Piper single-engine and set a flight plan for Destin, Florida. Flying over northern Alabama at 24,000 feet, he made a sequence of increasingly desperate radio calls to the nearest control tower, announcing that he had run into turbulence; that his “windshield was spider-cracking”; that the shattered glass had cut his neck; that he was “bleeding profusely” and “graying out.” He then pointed the autopilot toward the Gulf of Mexico and bailed out with a parachute over Harpersville, Alabama. After landing, he made his way to a motorcycle he had stashed at a local self-storage unit.

Unfortunately for Schrenker, when two Navy F-15 pilots caught up with the still-airborne Piper, they noted that the plane was in fine shape — except for the open pilot’s side door and empty cockpit. Even worse, Schrenker failed to put enough fuel in the plane to get it to the gulf. It crashed 200 feet from a residential neighborhood in northern Florida. In the wreckage, authorities found a campground guide minus pages for Alabama and Florida and a handwritten crib sheet with the bullet points “windshield is spider-cracking,” “bleeding very bad,” and “graying out.” Federal marshals found him at a KOA campground in Florida two days later. Perhaps swayed by the additional evidence that prosecutors turned up on his laptop — including Google searches like “how to jump out of the airplane when parachuting” and “requirements to get a Florida driver’s license” — he pleaded guilty in early June.

2:50 PM

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