SUMMARY: A rush hour commuter rail train smashed into a station in Hoboken on Thursday, killing one and injuring more than one hundred. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with Brenda Flanagan of NJTV News about the factors that may have led to the accident and upcoming investigations into transit security and safety.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Investigators in Northern New Jersey have a big question to ponder tonight: Why did a commuter train smash into a station in the midst of rush hour?
For now, the answer is anything but clear.
It was 8:45 this morning, when a New Jersey transit train came barreling into Hoboken without slowing down. A passenger in the first car said there'd been no hint of anything wrong.
JAMIE WEATHERHEAD-SAUL, Rain Passenger: There wasn't even a screeching, like it was halting. It just kept going. Maybe there was some kind of, like, braking involved, because the lights went off and people started screaming.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The speeding railcars crashed through a barrier and into the outer wall of the terminal waiting room, crushing the front of the train and collapsing part of the ceiling.
POLICE SCANNER AUDIO: We have a train that's into the train station at Hoboken terminal. We are going to need multiple EMS for multiple injuries.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Police and emergency workers rushed to the station, a commuter hub just outside New York that handles 50,000 passengers every day. Bystanders jumped in to help people pinned under mangled steel and concrete.
MIKE LARSON, New Jersey Transit Employee: The second half of the first car was completely destroyed, to where they were crawling on their hands and knees. And we were trying to get as many people out. I assisted in maybe three or four people getting out.
HARI SREENIVASAN:The lone fatality was a woman on the platform killed by the falling debris.
SUMMARY: The mysterious disappearance of EgyptAir Flight 804 and its 66 passengers somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea has left the international community scrambling for answers. For more on what could have happened to the flight, Hari Sreenivasan talks to former National Transportation Safety Board chair Deborah Hersman and former Deputy National Security Adviser Juan Zarate.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): We return to EgyptAir Flight 804 and what could have happened to it.
Deborah Hersman served as chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board from 2009 to 2014 and is now president of the National Safety Council, a nonprofit organization devoted to reducing preventable deaths and injuries. And Juan Zarate was deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism during the President George W. Bush administration. He's currently the chairman of the Financial Integrity Network, a consulting firm.
Deborah Hersman, I want to start with you.
At this stage, what are investigators thinking about? What are they looking for?
DEBORAH HERSMAN, Former Chairman, National Transportation Safety Board:Really, the first 24 hours, they're focused on response, recovery, and search for the aircraft, and so you can see clearly that's something that was a focus in this investigation.
But you want to gather any perishable evidence that might exist. You want to make sure you know who needs to be interviewed, that you're able to connect all of the dots very early in the investigation and grab any of that information.
Analyzing the radar data is going to be important, because what they need to do now is pinpoint where that aircraft is, so they can identify not just the aircraft, the parts and take care of the humans, but also get those black boxes, which are really important to the investigation.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Juan Zarate, given what little evidence has come out so far, what are the signs that point to fowl play?
JUAN ZARATE, Former Deputy National Security Adviser: Well, there aren't many signs.
And part of the reason you want to gather as much data and forensics as possible early on is try to give you clues. But authorities are indicating there weren't signs in terms of intelligence that a threat was pending or threatening this particular airline or this route.
There has been no claim of responsibility yet, and certainly we don't have any evidence that we have seen physically that would demonstrate this is terrorism. But we know terrorists have historically targeted aircraft. It has psychological, human and economic impact.
We know that al-Qaida and ISIS have been perfecting technologies and trying to hit us on aircraft over the years, whether it's the underwear bomb plot out of Yemen, the shoe and liquid bomb plots out of the U.K., or even the downing of the Metrojet, the Russian airliner out of the Sinai by ISIS.
They have been trying to do this. And they have had expert bomb-makers trying to figure out ways of evading the security technology that we have, Ibrahim al-Asiri, the master bomb-maker in Yemen who has been training individuals for years, as well as the Khorasan group, a senior group of al-Qaida figures in Syria that up to 2014 were trying to perfect non-metallic devices that could get on aircraft.
SUMMARY: Authorities on Friday said they found debris from EgyptAir Flight 804, which a day earlier plunged 38,000 feet into the Mediterranean Sea. Relatives of the 66 people on the plane mourned as harsh reality set in. Mystery still surrounds the cause — terrorism or catastrophic mechanical failure? John Yang reports, and science correspondent Miles O'Brien gives his analysis of what we know so far.
The black boxes were sitting on the ocean floor in what would have been plain sight, if there were any light at a depth of 12,800 feet. They were guarded by silent corpses, the passengers and crew of an Airbus A330 that plummeted to the bottom of the Atlantic in June 2009. For nearly two years, the boxes—not black, actually, but bright orange—had lain amid some of the most rugged undersea terrain in the world, 11,500-foot mountains rising from the ocean floor, covered with landslides and steep scarps. Until the days in May when an advanced robotic submersible, the Remora 6000, brought the two black boxes from Air France flight 447 to the surface, they were among the world’s most sought-after artifacts, the keys to understanding why a state-of-the-art widebody jet fell out of the sky on a routine flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 aboard. Since no one knew the exact coordinates of the crash, the searchers had to extrapolate their grid from the plane’s last known location. It took a team led by the king of undersea searchers, Dave Gallo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to find the wreckage; Phoenix International, a deepwater recovery company, finally brought the recorders home. Why did it take so long? “You can find a needle in a haystack,” Gallo says, “but you have to find the haystack first.”
French accident investigators removed the memory cards, carefully dried them, plugged in the right cables, and soon announced that the boxes had preserved nearly all the data they had captured—two hours of audio recorded from the cockpit and a complete record of thousands of measurements taken between takeoff and the moment the Airbus crashed. It was regarded, rightly, as a technological triumph. Although voice and data recorders are built to withstand the most extreme conditions of shock, fire, and pressure—they get fired from an air cannon as part of the testing regimen—they are not designed to preserve data for so long at such depths. The black boxes, built by Honeywell, had greatly exceeded their specifications.
But this elaborate and expensive undersea search could have been avoided; the technology has long existed that could make the recorders obsolete. As the BEA, the French agency that investigates air accidents, struggled to explain the crash in two inconclusive interim reports in 2009, the question was already being asked: If real-time stock quotes can be transmitted to anyone with a smartphone, why does the vital work of investigating an airplane crash still depend on reading physical memory chips that must be rescued from the wreckage?
The tragedy of Air France The tragedy of Air France 447 might have been on the minds of executives from Bombardier, the Canadian aircraft manufacturer, when they announced in 2010 that their new C-Series narrow-body jets, scheduled to come to market in 2013, would be the first commercial airliners built with the capability to transmit telemetry data instead of merely recording it. The idea—to stream black box data in real time, either directly to a ground station or by satellite relay—isn’t new, even though there remains no consensus on whether to call it an uplink, which is conceptually accurate, or a downlink, which expresses the physical relationship of an airplane to the ground.
Bombardier is advertising the innovation not as a way to improve crash investigation—survivability of data after a crash isn’t something airplane manufacturers like to boast about—but as a way to give airlines a central database for routine information on airplane operations and mechanical performance. At a minimum, the data could be stored securely as a backup to black boxes in the event of an accident. One company, Calgary-based FLYHT AeroMechanical Services, already provides this service as an aftermarket retrofit; so far, smaller carriers and charters have been the main customers.
SUMMARY: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which crashed last July in Eastern Ukraine, was likely blown apart by a Russian-built missile, according to Dutch investigators. The safety board also concluded that the missile was shot from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists. But the Russian state arms producer that makes Buk missiles disputed the findings. Judy Woodruff reports.
SUMMARY: Dutch investigators say evidence from the blast that brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 points to a Russian-built missile. Judy Woodruff discusses the findings with Peter Goelz, former managing director of the NTSB.
SUMMARY: Emergency crews found another victim in the wreckage of Amtrak train 188, which crashed Tuesday night in Philadelphia; all passengers and crew members believed on board have now been accounted for. Officials identified the train's engineer as Brandon Bostian, who suffered a concussion and other injuries during the crash. Gwen Ifill reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The search for answers of what caused the deadly derailment of an Amtrak train continued, as the focus shifted to the engineer.
Emergency crews labored steadily for a second day on the wreckage of Amtrak Train 188 in North Philadelphia, as officials confirmed grim news of another death.
DERRICK SAWYER, Fire Commissioner, Philadelphia Fire Commissioner: We utilized our hydraulic tools to open up the train a little bit more so that we can reach the person, and were able to extricate that person and have them transported to the medical examiner’s office.
GWEN IFILL: All 243 passengers and crew aboard the derailed train have now been accounted for. According to investigators, the train was moving at 102 miles an hour Tuesday night, more than twice the speed limit, when it careened off the tracks.
Elsewhere in Philadelphia this morning, a freight train also derailed in an unrelated incident. No deaths or injuries were reported. The Amtrak train’s engineer was identified as 32-year-old New Yorker Brandon Bostian. He suffered a concussion and other injuries during the crash.
On ABC’s Good Morning America, Bostian’s lawyer, Robert Goggin, said his client remembers nothing of the wreck.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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