The Ramblings of Octavo

You know what really pisses me off? People who think that because they’re behind a keyboard and anonymous, that absolves them of any accountability. People who flame someone and bitch about them publically and then, when they get called on it stammer to justify themselves with “but, we were only joking!” Fuck you - you weren’t joking, you were being an obnoxius, hurtful little shithead and you thought because you were behind a keyboard it was ok.

You wouldn’t say that stuff to their face would you? In front of a keyboard though, all of a sudden you develop a pair, and decide it’s OK to be a complete asshole. Well here’s the truth - you are a small minded coward with no balls.

As I mentioned in my last post on this topic the Helderberg was SAA flight 295 en route from Taipei to Mauritius. There are many conspiracy theories that surround this crash and no one seems to know the whole truth. I intend, over the course of a few posts, to give you as condensed a version of events as I can.

The first thing to know is that there were two official investigations into the Helderberg incident. The first was the Margo commissionNamed for Justice Margo who headed the commission. This enquiry was held about a year after the incident and was the official accident investigation. The second was a TRCTruth and Reconciliation Commission hearing which was instigated by the familes of some of the passengers aboard the Helderberg. They requested the investigation because there were so many rumours and irregularities surrounding the original investigation. The TRC was initially reluctant, but something that Dr. Wouter Basson said during his own TRC hearing sparked their interest.

Dr. Basson apparently mentioned that the fire that brought down the Helderberg was a “classic chemical fire”. The official 1988 investigation had said that it was merely some packaging material that had caught fire. The TRC held an in-camera hearing in 1998 to try and get to the bottom of the issue and while they certainly brought a lot of new information into the public domain, all it served to do was raise even more questions and rumours. Nothing had truly been resolved. The TRC handed their findings over to the Scorpions/NPANational Prosecuting Authority - our version of the FBI who dithered for a while and finally made their reports to the Minister for Transport at the time, Mr. Omar. In 2002 Mr. Omar declined to reopen the Helderberg investigation as he felt there was no new evidence that would influence the outcome of the investigation. That is a patently absurd comment, but he’d managed to drag it out so long, that there was hardly any reaction, since the story had long since gone cold.

For me, the TRC commission brought up 2 particularly important points that were ignored or dismissed by the 1988 investigation. The first is the missing ZUR tape. At that time, SAA had installed on all of it’s international fleet a radio able to keep them in contact with a specific station in JHB. That station was called ZUR. At that time, SAA and British Airways were the only two airlines in the world with this ability. ZUR was manned 24 hours a day and had tapes recording all ZUR communications on a permanent basis. These recordings were set up so there was a 5 minute overlap on all tapes to make sure nothing was lost. Once a tape was finished, it would be marked with the date and time and locked away in a cabinet. These tapes were reused in such a way that at any time, ZUR had a record of the last 31 days worth of communications.

The morning after the Helderberg crash, Captain Mickey Mitchell walked into the ZUR station and told the operaters he was securing the ZUR tapes of the previous evening for the DCADepartment of Civil Avaiation investigation - as he should. He took the two relevant tapes and locked them in his office. When the DCA arrived 3 weeks later to collect all the relevant documents pertaining to the incident, Mitchell handed over the ZUR tapes. The DCA returned the tapes a few days later, telling SAA that they had been given tapes for the day AFTER the helderberg crash. When they requested the correct tapes, they were told that they had been taped over.

During the Margo investigation, Judge Margo was very angry about the missing ZUR tapes and demanded to know what happened to them. No one came forward. SAA said that they had either been lost or overtaped.

If, as Captain Mitchell testified at the TRC, the ZUR tape had been overwritten, why did he not produce the overwritten tape and apologise for the bungle? And if it had been overwritten, how did the correct tape get out of Mitchell’s office and back into circulation at ZUR? How did Mitchell give the DCA the tapes for the day after the Helderberg crash if he secured the ZUR tapes the morning after the crash?

The only conclusion is that the ZUR tape was not overtaped - it was deliberatly lost or destroyed by Captain Mitchell/SAA. To date the ZUR tape in question is still missing.

To be continued…

See, now this is why I really want a Sony Aibo!

Robo-dogs aside, BBC world this morning was bleating about how Scientists have discovered “the most earth-like world yet”. I hate this kind of reporting. Yes, this planet is the most earth-like exosolar planet found so far, but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually anything like earth. It’s somewhere between 2.8 and 11 times the size of earth and orbits a Red Dwarf. That is NOT earth-like, I don’t care HOW you spin it, it’s NOT earth-like. All you’re doing is getting people’s hopes up. The truth is that we currently do not have the ability to see truly earth-like planets, because they are simply too small and do not have a large enough gravitational effect on their host stars for us to detect the wobble. So, unpack your suitcase Dorris, we’re not heading off to Orion just yet - we need some decent telescopes first. Preferebly several of them. In orbit.

Read the slightly less hyperbolic New Scientist report here

After much discussion and napkin math, I’ve decided that if you were to build a hovercraft and use P4 dual-core chips to power the onboard circuitry and control systems, you wouldn’t need any jet fans - you could just use the standard CPU-fans to keep it afloat… hehehe….

All of this came about after a work mate joked that when he directed the CPU-fan outlet duct down at the floor on his new dual-core box, it hovered like a Harrier jump-jet.

Conspiracy theories are great. I love reading them and wondering if they have any truth to them. I especially love being convinced by a theory only to have some new information come along and change my mind. It keeps you wondering what the real truth is. Of course it’s very frustrating, but life is a struggle after all

I remember watching the fox documentary on how the moon landings were faked and at the time doing a lot of reading on the subject. I was almost convinced. Then I found a site called http://www.clavius.org/ which pretty much debunked the whole thing for me and once again restored my faith in the moon landings

Then there’s the 9/11 conspiracy theory that says that the twin towers were brought down by controlled demolitions. I’m pretty convinced by this one. They put on a strong argument to show why and how a plane strike couldn’t have caused the collapse in the way it did.

The last conspiracy theory is a lot more local, but just as (if not more) interesting. The Helderberg was SAA flight 295 from Taipei to Mauritius in 1988. I plunged into the Indian ocean 140 nautical miles out from Mauritius killing all 189 on board.

The official explanation is that a fire broke out on board at the top of descent into Mauritius, causing structural failure and or incapacitating the crew which lead to the plane crash. However that explanation and the official enquiry into the crash both completely ignore some pretty serious evidence. Evidence which points to a massive cover-up by SAA and Armscor (both parastatals at the time). Evidence which, if it had come to light at the time, would quite possibly have grounded the entire SAA international fleet and caused an international incident.
Sounds a bit dramatic? I’ll give you a condensed version of events in my next post