Posted on 12/17/2013 2:26:48 AM PST by WhiskeyX
HONOLULU -- Crews will try to salvage the plane that crashed off the Hawaiian island of Molokai....
Hawaii Health Director Loretta Fuddy was the sole fatality....
A 200-foot recovery vessel will leave Honolulu Harbor on Tuesday night and crews will attempt to pull the plane out of the water Thursday morning, Weiss said, adding that the effort will be paid for by an insurance company....
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Sunken Cessna update.
Would not be at all surprised to learn this effort gets sabotaged or sidetracked in some fashion. Perhaps the Just Us department or
some other rogue agency will show up and lay claim to the aircraft,
spirit it away and then issue a sanitized report. Not easy to sabotage
an aircraft engine without leaving some trace of foul play behind.
I’d bet that if deliberate the expectation was the plane would be
further from land and perhaps fall from a higher altitude thus making
evidence disappear. This story bears watching and the actual recovery
efforts bear CLOSE monitoring by NON government employed people.
The birth certificate is under the passenger seat.
Typically when a small plane crashes especially in the water there are few if any survivors. It seems strange that everyone else including the pilots survived but only this woman did not. It might be coincidence but her ties to Obama’ s highly questionable birth records add suspicion to her being the only fatality in a plane crash .
I would be checking to find out which passenger was responsible for seeing that she didn’t survive.
A passenger list would be helpful.
All special Ops?
Was she Ron Browned or Vince Fostered? Did she somehow get a gunshot from the back of hte head as part of the crash?
They don’t know if this is the same plane. How would a plane come back to the surface to be seen from a helicopter?
The article quotes the NTSB person but this isn’t being done by the NTSB; it’s being done by the insurance company. The NTSB says they are waiting to hear the results of the autopsy. The autopsy shouldn’t have anything to do with why the engine failed - and if it does, it should be law enforcement that investigates the connection between her death and the plane’s engine failure.
By saying they are waiting for the results of the autopsy it seems to me that the NTSB is looking for an excuse to not investigate any further. Get a coroner to say there were no poisons in Fuddy’s body, and then you can say it doesn’t matter why the engine failed because it probably wasn’t foul play. But the NTSB is not law enforcement. They are supposed to find out what causes crashes, period - whether or not foul play is likely.
The wreckage needs to be recovered from a safety standpoint (which the NTSB is supposed to be about) because this is the 2nd Cessna engine failure in this area within 50 days of each other - doubling the number of engine failures accumulated for that engine over the last 34 years. The earlier incident off of Maui on Oct 21 gave the NTSB a fully-intact aircraft where it was known that engine failure was the problem. All they need to investigate is the condition of the engine. It’s been 2 months now and they’ve still not identified what caused that engine to fail.
If I was the insurer I’d sure as heck want to know what happened. Especially since the pilot who flew the Fuddy plane is not a pilot for Makani Kai Air, as claimed in all the news stories. The company’s website listing staff has been changed at least once since the crash and STILL doesn’t list Clyde Kawasaki as a pilot for them. Right now they’ve got 2 different pages listing some different pilots. Both pages have been updated within the past 3 months, and yet neither page lists Kawasaki as a pilot for them. In the 2 years that Schuman says Kawasaki’s been flying for them, Kawasaki has NEVER been listed as their pilot.
Kawasaki had flown for Aloha Airlines, we are told. Aloha Airlines went into bankruptcy several years ago and the company that ended up mostly taking over was associated with Mokulele, which was the company that had this other Cessna engine failure 50 days before the Fuddy crash. The pilots in that crash were loudly praised but never publicly named. I’m told that sometimes air companies borrow from each other in the practical daily workings. Mokulele is one of the airlines that flies Cessnas from the Molokai airport. If Kawasaki is actually a pilot for Mokulele and was just borrowed by Schumer’s company for that flight, that would mean the 2 Cessna engine failures within 50 days both happened with a Mokulele pilot flying the Cessna. Mokulele doesn’t list their pilots anywhere that I can find.
The commuter airlines are a big business in Hawaii, and the competition is cut-throat, as evidenced by the lawsuits, bankruptcy deals, etc that have plagued the industry within the last 5 years. There are all kinds of motives for foul play, and Fuddy’s family, the pilots, the airline companies, and the insurers for those companies deserve answers.
I wonder how common it is for fully submerged planes to resurface after a day or two. I’ve read that the waters are deep there. If the plane sunk to the bottom there would be a long way for it to go, to get back to the surface where it could be seen from a helicopter.
It was initially assumed the aircraft sank in deep water. One of the search and rescue aircraft seems to have caught a glimpse of what appeared to be the shape of an aircraft underwater at a relatively shallow depth, giving hope the underwater object sighted may be the Cessna Grand Caravan just lost at sea. On the other hand, it may be an another lost aircraft sunken atop one of the shallow offshore reefs.
If the aircraft they seek sank in deep water, it may not be practical to attempt a recovery without tremendous cost beyond the scope of what an insurance company can economically justify.
Check the budget for operating that baby....
They aren’t saying it “came back to the surface.” An observer can see underwater a small distance from above when the Sun angle and surface conditions facilitate doing so. Since this is a volcanic island, you can expect to find some shallow reefs near the shoreline and some very steep depths adjacent to those reefs. If the sunken aircraft happened to sink atop a shallow reef, it may be possible to glimpse the shape of the aircraft underwater on the reef when the viewing conditions are right. If you’ve ever done any fishing, it is like trying to see the fish underwater as you are fishing.
It was the Coast Guard people who saw the shape? When did they see it? Those details weren’t in this article. Is there another article that has that information? Thanks!
100% agree.
“Is there another article that has that information?”
I haven’t spotted an article with the kind of specifics you are trying to find, but I’ve posted the following article where the Coast Gurad describes some of their actions.
A U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer describes the crash scene as ‘surreal’
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 8:07:18 AM · 1 of 1
To get a general idea of what the area around the airport looks like offshore, see the aerial satellite view at http://maps.google.com. Use “Kalaupapa Peninsula, Kalawao, HI” as your search term. Zoom in on the area of Kalaupapa Airport-Lup and its runway. Follow the runway offshore and see the underwater terrain. One of the new reports says the crash site was about 400-500 yards offshore. The survivors reportedly drifted in two groups one-half mile and one mile out to sea when they were rescued.
Simple.
Just like in LA. Make sure one of the coroners has poison in his body, and the rest will say whatever you tell them to.
I wonder if they'll use arsenic again?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.