Posted on 09/28/2007 9:12:06 AM PDT by Dubya
MEXICO CITY — U.S. authorities are assisting the Mexican government in the investigation of an American business jet that crashed in Cancun this week with four tons of cocaine on board, officials said Thursday.
One of the men listed as the registered owners of the plane, Joao Luiz Malago, said in a telephone interview from Brazil that his Florida-based company sold the aircraft for $2 million on Sept. 16 to a Lakeland, Fla., man and his partner, who Malago believed was from Miami.
Malago said he feared the man was dead because he hasn't been picking up the phone.
Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico had no information on any American citizens being killed or arrested in connection with the aircraft, a 1975 model Gulfstream II.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Hmmmm...that will put a dent in somebody’s political fundraising campaign. ;)
Given the specs Old Professer posted, I'm wondering how it got off the ground. Should we really believe there were 4 tons aboard? Assuming they had a reasonable amount of fuel along for the ride, looks like they would have been close to double the maximum payload. I don't know anything about aviation, but are planes really designed so they can lift off with nearly twice the load they can safely fly with?
apparently the difference between flying and crashing. Someone didn't adjust the fuel load to compensate for the extra weight?
From post #15: Payload with Full Fuel 2,831 Maximum Payload 5,456
The way I read it, compensating for the extra weight would have required putting the fuel load well into the negative range. Am I reading the numbers wrong?
How much weight could they strip out of the plane, seats, nonessential plumbing and wiring, walls, carpet, etc?
The question is one of how much fuel they would need to get to Mena, AR?
Apparently not enough :-)
Or perhaps they accidentally stripped out something that WAS essential. They’d only had the plane for 2 weeks, so it would have to have been a rush job to pull out close to 5000 pounds of “non-essential” stuff.
Aircraft are routinely flown over “gross”. In colder climates, 10% over the book figure is considered normal and approved.
The gross weight rating is puplished partly because of structural concerns, but more for airspeed operating envelope, and safe operations in an engine out situation for multi engine airplanes.
Adjust rotation speed, and climb speed, and it will fly. That aircraft probably still climbed in excess of 1,000fpm at sea level with that load. Lose an engine, though, and it is a different story.
As a side note, many of the military aircraft have published operation speeds for various MTOWs. Esentially, adjustable max gross weight ratings.
Imagine that the cocaine was in milk bottles, now imagine arranging them in rows, layers and columns to accomodate 476 bottles; that is how much space 4 tons of powdered coke would require.
One gallon milk bottles.
An eight ball (1/8 of an ounce) sells for around $200 in the midwest. So the retail value of the coke is over $200 million
I recalculated using bricks as a volume measure based on gov. numbers (6”X12”X2”, 21/4 lbs); 24 bricks = 1 cubic foot in volume and weighs 54 lbs.; 1 cu ft will accomodate 4 bottles; 8000/54 = 592.6 bottles.
I forgot my mind somewhere in the beginning of this exercise:
At 12”x6”X2” it takes 12 bricks to make one cubic foot
Given 2.25 pounds per brick, 1 cubic foot of cocaine weighs 27 pounds
8000/27 = 296.296 bricks
Four one gallon milk jugs will sit side by side on one square foot of floor
4 X 296 = 1184 stupid milk jugs
Yea the McClatchy site took a couple of shots in that direction too.
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