What is that wacky Swift boat smearer Marc Morano up to? I don’t visit his website, of course, since it is filled with disinformation and apparently he is too busy to blog.
But somebody sent me the story and the link to his website, and then I noticed that Morano links to stories here on CP, strangely enough, so I thought I would return the favor this one time.
Anyway, one would suppose the Swift Boat Smearer is being mockingly humorous or satirical, like his namesake, Jonathan Swift, by making this article his banner headline. But then really most of the articles Morano links to merit mocking or satire – “GORE LIED: Global temperatures plunge further; have dropped .63?F (.35?C) since Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth” [he kills me!] — so you really can’t tell whether his whole damn website is just some sort of elaborate performance art, like something Andy Kaufman would have done.
Anyway, if we drop the part of the story that connects things to global warming — which is beyond tenuous — the article itself, from Russia Today, has some interesting stuff on the weather conditions over the Intertropical Convergence Zone that can make for “white knuckle” flying:
For even the most experienced pilots, flying over the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is oftentimes a white-knuckle affair.
The ITC zone is a constantly fluctuating band that is located between 5º north and 5º south of the equator. It produces some of the heaviest precipitation on the planet, as well as the bumpiest airplane rides.
This meteorologically active region, which gives off a constant vertical updraft of air along its path, was known to sailors as ‘the doldrums’ due to the absence of any refreshing breeze. But for passengers on an airplane traveling over the ITCZ, the sensation can be much different.
Indeed, as vertical-flowing air masses move upwards from the surface of the water, sometimes at great speeds, airplanes may feel a lot like a roller coaster ride. Meanwhile, storms in this volatile region can climb to 50,000 feet, thus forcing pilots, who usually stay at an altitude of 35,000 feet, to find a way to skirt them.
Tragically, it seems that the pilots of Air France 447 met exactly this sort of perfect storm.
William Voss, head of the Flight Safety Foundation, told Bloomberg that there was an “explosion of weather” along the flight route of the doomed aircraft where three storm fronts converged.
“If you take a look at the satellite information online it was like an explosion of weather at the time the Air France flight would have been trying to pick its way through the Intertropical Convergence Zone,” he said.
“The area of weather along that route of flight wasn’t even there when the aircraft was leaving the coast,” Voss added.
Anyway, I thought readers might like to see this stuff and have some comments on it or Morano’s website.
