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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1242 thread views

Transnational Thursday for June 12, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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US has started removing non-essential people from the Middle East. People assume that this means an attack by Iran is imminent. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-embassy-iraq-preparing-ordered-evacuation-due-heightened-security-risks-2025-06-11/

The expected series of events would be:

  • Iran is very insistent on making nuclear weapons.
  • US and Israel cannot allow this
  • Israel attacks Iran
  • Iran attacks Israel and US bases in the region directly.

The only thing I can say right now is that Israel is much better at special military operations than Russia. Their rockets have actually killed several high-ranking Iranian officers and scientists on the first attempt.

I doubt the Russians ever actually tried.

IT’S HAPPENING

—inb4 source

Source

The US should have dealt with Iran decades ago. Iraq was harmless

"Should have" to what end?

The whole point of the Iraq war from the PoV of the "realist" faction in the Bush Jr White House (I would guess particularly Cheyney and Rumsfeld) was to set up a US client state on Iran's border, ideally one that (unlike Saudi Arabia) was not funding Al-Quaeda. The project failed because the only Iraqi faction that was willing to collaborate with the American invaders was Badr/SCIRI, which was also the pro-Iranian faction.

There was a long period (roughly from 9-11 to the defeat of ISIS by Russian and Iranian forces in 2017) where a rapprochement between the US and Iran would have been possible, based on the shared enemy in Salafi Jihadism (including Al-Quaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS), if both sides had been run by actual foreign policy realists.

The US should have dealt with Iran decades ago.

How, though?

Iran is mountaineous and has a large population, so a traditional war would have been protracted instead of something like the Irak war where the army surrendered effectively immediately.

Boeing just doesn't seem to be able to catch a break.

There is a tragic crash in India with one of their 787-8. And it is nightmarish - full plane, full of fuel, just after take off crashes in residential area. There seems to be survivors which is miracle in itself.

An Air India passenger plane bound for London Gatwick crashed shortly after taking off in Ahmedabad on Thursday, leaving at least 204 people dead.

The flight was carrying 242 passengers and crew when it was involved in what the airline has called a "tragic accident" in the city in western India.

Ahmedabad's police chief told the BBC that 204 bodies had been recovered, while 41 people were being treated for injuries.

He earlier told news agencies there appeared to be no survivors from the crash, and that some local people would also have died given where the plane came down.

Details are still emerging from the scene. Here is what we know so far.

As always for plane crashes pprune is the source for latest news, speculations, bickering, wild theories

https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-crash-near-ahmedabad-7.html

The WSJ reports:

Preliminary findings indicate that switches controlling fuel flow to the jet’s two engines were turned off, leading to an apparent loss of thrust shortly after takeoff, the people said. Pilots use the switches to start the jet’s engines, shut them down, or reset them in certain emergencies.

The switches would normally be on during flight, and it is unclear how or why they were turned off, these people said. The people also said it was unclear whether the move was accidental or intentional, or whether there was an attempt to turn them back on.

This is preliminary and unofficial, so this isn't necessarily the real cause; no small part of the Boeing MAX scandal was because original 'leaks' heavily emphasized pilot error over the technical faults.

But if true, this is staggering. NA255 and other takeoff misconfiguration disasters have happened, and typically reflect a long series of systemic failures in addition to pilot misconduct, but each individual step is recognizable and understandable until it was too late. By contrast, the aircraft here could not have taxi'd, or run up, or gotten down the runway with fuel cut off to both engines; they're designed so that neither one could be hit accidentally. There is no failure that would cause pilots to turn them off mid-takeoff, and not even some bizarre reason to want to try.

Which... does not leave a lot of options, and they're all bad.

EDIT: official preliminary report here:

The aircraft achieved the maximum recorded airspeed of 180 Knots IAS at about 08:08:42 UTC and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec. The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cut off...

As per the EAFR, the Engine 1 fuel cutoff switch transitioned from CUTOFF to RUN at about 08:08:52 UTC. The APU Inlet Door began opening at about 08:08:54 UTC, consistent with the APU Auto Start logic. Thereafter at 08:08:56 UTC the Engine 2 fuel cutoff switch also transitions from CUTOFF to RUN.

I don't think there's any plausible solely-electrical or mechanical explanation that would explain these recordings.

We should wait for audio analysis. The timing of the switches being turned off critical. To the precise millisecond.

Yeah. There's been air crash analysis where they've done some absolute magic in sound analysis, up to and including detecting locations of explosions based on sound triangulation from one cockpit mic to another. I'm just not feeling very optimistic about where they could point, given:

In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.

There's some videos here and here (cw: deadly plane crash).

Too grainy to completely exclude takeoff misconfiguration (esp on a sleek design like the 787), but at least no obvious structural failure, and I'd be surprised if takeoff misconfiguration could get that high in those weather conditions with that passenger load. NTSB's going to do some tests for fuel contamination, pilot error, maintenance faults, so on, but at the risk of speculating too early a lot of what I'm seeing points to either dual mechanical failure of the engines or electrical failure of the whole aircraft, especially the reported RAT deployment is real. Given everything else a lot of people are predisposed to think software or major design failure, but it's hard to think of a software bug or hardware flaw that would hide for over a decade and then hit both engines simultaneously. Maybe flying into a flock of birds a la Sully, but without the river and miracle?

It hit the best med school in the state during the crash. I suppose that's one way to deal with elite over-production.

That is a fucking GTA mission. We are living in a simulation

Scary and sad stuff.

Didn't know people could survive being inside massive fireballs though.

People sometimes survive absolutely unbelievable stuff because bodies just happened be in just the right way. And sometimes they die because their body has a mild shock in a very unlucky way.

The universe is capricious.

There's a lot of surprising survivals in takeoff and landing crashes: Northwest 255 is a pretty (in)famous takeoff misconfiguration that managed to kill more people than were on the flight and had one survivor.

It's early so things are still confusing, but there are reports that he was in 11A. That's right by the emergency exit. He opened it and jumped out before the crash.

I don't buy it. He'd have to time the jump perfectly and then there's still a lot of "how did you avoid debris / fuel / landing on something hard"

Somebody has to be the one in a million. Guy might just have gotten extremely lucky.

Movie main character stuff.

Didn't know people could survive being inside massive fireballs though.

Human bodies are amazing in pulling miracles of survival.

Exactly. With enough of air travel and air travel accidents, it's not extremely surprising that surprising coincidences happen now and then. In 1970s a Serbian stewardess reportedly survived after aircraft exploded midair. ("Air safety investigators attributed Vulović's survival to her being trapped by a food trolley in the DC-9's fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground.")

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