Former Senator Ted Stevens Killed In Plane Crash – Others Narrowly Survive
August 10th, 2010
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Alaska has more aircraft per capita than any other state in the US and most places in the world. Small aircraft are a vital means of travel in the massive and largely unpopulated state, and it’s also one of the most dangerous places to fly. While the relative risk is still fairly low, many lives have been lost in plane crashes in Alaska.
It seems that yet another one has been lost – that of former Senator Ted Stevens. Stevens plane crashed on a remote mountainside killing Stevens. The plane also carried NASA’s former chief administrator, Sean O’Keefe and his son. O’Keefe and his son survived the crash and, at last report, both had sustained injuries that were thought to be non-life threatening. Luckily for them, it seems rescuers got to the sight of the crash fairly quickly.
JUNEAU, Alaska — A float plane carrying former Sen. Ted Stevens and ex-NASA chief Sean O’Keefe crashed into a remote mountainside in Alaska, killing the longtime senator and four others, authorities said Tuesday. O’Keefe and his teenage son survived the crash with broken bones and other injuries, said former NASA spokesman Glenn Mahone. The O’Keefes spent Monday night on the mountain with several volunteers who discovered the wreckage and tended to the injured until rescuers arrived Tuesday morning.
Plane crash + NASA big shot + former senator = conspiracy theories in 5…4…3…2…
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Announcements, History, Misc, Politics, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 10th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
General aviation has some of the same media problems nuclear energy does, in that the fact that an aircraft is involved always is considered a major factor in the story. If these people had been riding in a bus, this would not be the case. Not to imply that the death of a former Senator, and a former NASA chief would be news, only that the type vehicle wouldn’t be considered that important.
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August 10th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
While there are several parallels that could be drawn between the aviation industry and nuclear power, “media problems” would not have occurred to me to be one of them. Please explain. If Senator Stevens had died in a bicyle crash it would still be big news. Admittedly the public seems to have a keener interest in plane crashes than car accidents due to the relative novelty of it, but I never thought of it as a “media problem” with anything approaching long term harm to the industry.
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August 10th, 2010 at 7:52 pm
Plane crash + NASA big shot + former senator = conspiracy theories in 5…4…3…2…
Car crash + beautiful divorced mother of heirs to English throne = conspiracy theories…
Boat + beautiful wife of actor Robert Wagner = conspiracy theories…
I think the pattern could be summarized as:
Famous Person + sudden death = conspiracy theories
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August 10th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Blubba said:
Bad press has done the general aviation sector harm, although it is not as apparent as it is for nuclear energy. It has been under attack by several forces for years. It’s obvious the airlines are still trying to fix their broken business model by inflaming the public with one-sided media stories. For several years, the airlines have tried to shift the burden of supporting airport infrastructure by tossing it on the back of general aviation.
I have seen a lot of one sided reporting. I don’t know for sure if there is an agenda, or if reporters are simply taking the easy way and regurgitating what they are receiving from a single source. As we know, journalists for the public media outlets do not do enough diligence in researching and understanding their subjects before they publish or air a story. However this is not limited to aviation.
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August 10th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Sad . . .his first wife died in a plane crash, too. Stevens was on board that one, as well, but survived.
As far as conspiracies go, if one existed it was much more mundane and involved framing him on corruption charges just prior his last re-election attempt. He was barely defeated as a result of the conviction, which was later thrown out because of prosecutorial misconduct. If it hadn’t been for the bogus prosecution, he would have probably still been in office.
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August 10th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
DV82XL said:
Just so I’m clear, by “bad press” I assume you mean undesirable press (from the perspective of the one getting it), not sloppy journalism as typified by Sally Field in the Paul Newman movie “Absence of Malice”. I remember getting literature from AOPA (back when I was serious about getting my private pilot license) telling their side of the airport use debate. Similar arguments go on all the time, such as with trucking companies and how much they should pay in highway taxes. While I’m emotionally sympathetic to general aviation, I don’t know that I find AOPA’s arguments compelling from a public policy or economic standpoint. I really don’t have a feel for what is “fair”. I’ve probably been out of that circle too long. I wasn’t aware that the airlines try to use accidents like this against GA.
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August 10th, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Blubba said:
Oops, I meant that the other way around. You meant bad press = sloppy journalism right?
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August 10th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Blubba said:
Again like nuclear energy, its a combination of both.
Blubba said:
Well shutting down the so called harbour airports, not letting air taxies use the main terminal in many airports, and several other moves of this type, has made the economic arguments weaker, for sure. Its seems it is fairly easy to kick the economic legs out of any business by destroying infrastructure, (c.f. streetcars) and over regulation.
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August 10th, 2010 at 9:26 pm
DV82XL said:
I suppose you could say that. Although there are some legitimate points to it. Car crashes are not, in and of themselves, newsworthy. They are too common. Cars crash all the time. Planes do not. Still, general aviation crashes are common enough that they only usually make the local news, not the national news – unless someone famous is on board or something.
Each year there are a couple hundred general aviation crashes that result in fatality. This makes it far less safe than travel by commercial jet, but it’s still perfectly safe by any reasonable standard, considering the number of hours flown and people who safely fly on general aviation aircraft.
When I was younger I was in the Civil Air Patrol, so I had some experience with the occasional aircraft crash. They are often more dramatic than car crashes for a number of reasons. There’s a lot less suspense in a car crash. The car accident happens, the ambulance arrives and you know if they’re dead/alive/seriously injured. Small aircraft commonly go missing and then it’s a big deal to find them and if the location is remote, to get in by chopper and find the victims and get them out.
Often if it’s at sea or somewhere remote, the way it works is the aircraft stops communicating and then you get an ELT transmission that has to be located. The ELT, emergency locater transmitter has really changed a lot in the past few years. All the new ones have GPS and transmit their location very accurately. Some of the older ones still don’t. Back when I was involved, they generally did not have GPS and that turned it into a very dramatic suspenseful kind of thing, because the ELT was found by radio direction finding. Basically first you’d figure out the general vicinity where it was coming from and then send in air and ground teams with directional antennas. It could take some time – hours, if the crash was not visibly apparent from the air. On some training exercises I remember running into some real problems with RDF. Topography could be a huge issue. On one exercise we had a transmitter in a vally that was surrounded by steep granite cliffs, and they seemed to reflect the transmissions enough to make it seem like they came from every direction.
Of course, the same kind of suspense, and even worse, can happen when a watercraft is lost.
But those are all reasons why I think news likes to make a bigger deal of it: The novelty, the fact that it can be suspenseful, the fact that they don’t crash that often.
BTW: for those who don’t know, “general aviation” means the smaller aircraft that are often piston driven, like Pipers, Cessnas and that kind of thing. They are a world apart from commercial flights on the big jetliners.
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August 11th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I agree; it’s the fact that plane crashes occur so rarely that makes them more newsworthy. If the casualty list is above a certain number (or of some are famous) or if it’s an unusual vehicle to be in an accident, it’s much more likely to be reported.
There was a rather odd juxtaposition of this back in 2003. There were two separate accidents in which seven NASA employees were killed. The first was the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke apart on reentry, killing all seven crew. The second was a shuttle van out in the southwest somewhere, running I think as a carpool for NASA employees. It ran off the side of an embankment, crashed, and killed the driver and all six passengers. This got mentioned on places like spaceflightnow.com, but not in the mainstream media, where a bunch of engineers or technicians getting in a car crash isn’t really noteworthy. Same death toll, but far less conspicuous a death.
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August 11th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
A plane crash involving a political figure is only a conspiracy when it’s a Progressive who dies*.
Sen. Wellstone was killed by The Evil Right Wing because he was going to usher in a New Progressive Era Of Awesome. Plane crashes don’t “just happen”. (Seriously, I’ve had people try and tell me things that amount to that.)
Ex Senator Stevens? Plainly just an accident. Plane crashes just happen.
(* I suppose the fringe Crazy Right might push such a thing when a sitting Conservative dies in a crash, but I ain’t ever seen it. The Progressive crazy seems more widespread – maybe because they’re more talkative?
That and Sen. Stevens was both out of office and at least semi-disagraced.)
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August 11th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Sigivald said:
That reminds me of a line I heard a few years back, when the question came up as to why conservatives weren’t protesting some of Bush’s policies in larger numbers (conservatives had plenty of criticism of his policies, and I know some guys down south who went to numerous rallies on border and tax/spend issues, but their protests tended to be much smaller and, frankly, more sedate than leftists’). The best answer I heard: “Well, yeah. Conservatives can’t come protest as much – they tend to have jobs.”
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August 11th, 2010 at 6:42 pm
Donovon was ABB’s top Nuclear power guy:
NORWALK, Conn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 4, 1996–In view of the facts released so far, ABB Group said with great regret today in Zurich that Robert E. Donovan, the company’s executive vice president for the Americas region and president and CEO of ABB Inc. in the United States, must be assumed to have been among those killed in the crash yesterday of a U.S. military plane near Dubrovnik, Croatia. The plane was carrying U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and a delegation of U. S. business leaders on a trade mission to the Balkans. The mission was investigating ways to help rebuild the war-battered region’s infrastructure.
Mr. Donovan was named president and chief executive officer of ABB Inc. in January 1994. In addition, he was executive vice president of ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd., based in Zurich, overseeing ABB operations throughout the Americas.
A member of the official Commerce Department mission, Mr. Donovan was to discuss U.S. interest in specific infrastructure and power projects in the region, and help uncover new trade and investment opportunities. The company provides products and services for power generation, transmission & distribution, industrial processes and rail transportation–all of which are part of the short-term needs in Bosnia.
According to the company, Mr. Donovan was looking forward to the trip and the opportunity to help further economic development in the war-scarred region. As a graduate of West Point and a commander in the Vietnam conflict, he also was eager to meet with troops serving in the country. It is believed that Mr. Donovan did meet with troops Wednesday morning before boarding the flight.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/ABB+SAYS+ROBERT+DONOVAN+PRESUMED+DEAD+IN+PLANE+CRASH-a018154862
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August 11th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
On July 11, 1990, during the course of his investigations, Gary Caradori, 41, died in the crash of his small plane, together with his 8-year-old son, after a mid-air EXPLOSION whose cause has not yet been discovered. A skilled and cautious pilot, Caradori told friends repeatedly in the weeks before his death that he feared his plane would be sabotaged.
The Franklin Credit Union Child-Sex Ring Scandal
Take Your Victim To The White House As A Guest of the GOP
http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/archive/oldnews2/boystown/
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August 11th, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Ahhh, there they are.
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