Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms fails to do their job, and it costs lives.

Spectre, the only way you'll bring down a plane with a .22 is if you shoot it at very high altitude and cause a MAJOR explosive decompression.

Hate to be pedantic, but even this wouldn't work. In fact the pressurization system is man enough to maintain cabin pressure for the odd hole or two.
 
Hate to be pedantic, but even this wouldn't work. In fact the pressurization system is man enough to maintain cabin pressure for the odd hole or two.

It could, in the right spot, some things are weaker than others... And bringing a plane down doesn't mean making it explode in mid air, by bringing it down I mean forcing it to make an emergency stop at the very least.
 
The Drug Cartel gets guns from anywhere. I'm sick of Mexico's President blaming the US for the all the Cartels guns. The Mexican Army sells their guns to the Cartel all the time, because they get paid very little so selling their equipment is worthwhile for them. The Drug Cartels have the resources to get guns anywhere they like. Sure they can get some from the United States but the automatic weapons they have I doubt come from the US since its not cheap or easy to get your hands on them legally.
 
There is ample evidence that upwards of 90% of the guns the cartels have come from the USA. There is evidence to prove this too. The fully automatic guns they have came from outside of the USA, but most of the guns they are using are not fully automatic.
 
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Sorry about the delay in getting back to this thread - I was working my arse off and arranging to buy another motorcycle.

There is ample evidence that upwards of 90% of the guns the cartels have come from the USA. There is evidence to prove this too. The fully automatic guns they have came from outside of the USA, but most of the guns they are using are not fully automatic.

Debunked already in the Gun thread (which is cross-linked already in this thread). No, they're not.

It could, in the right spot, some things are weaker than others... And bringing a plane down doesn't mean making it explode in mid air, by bringing it down I mean forcing it to make an emergency stop at the very least.

Hate to be pedantic, but even this wouldn't work. In fact the pressurization system is man enough to maintain cabin pressure for the odd hole or two.

First off, i'm not sure how shooting a compressor blade would cause a turbine stage to 'self-destruct'... wrong end of the engine.

Secondly the metal strip the case of Concorde hit a tyre, not the engine. Your progression of events is entirely wrong.

More to the point, if you shot a weapon into the inlet you're going to be hitting the fan face, the blades of which are usually titanium. It's going to take something all together more meaty than a 22 to damage them sufficiently for them to fail.

Let's address all of these together. I was wrong about the overall sequence - I had remembered a preliminary (and in hindsight, speculatory) report that had the metal FOD had gone into the engines, which disintegrated, ruptured and caused the fire and subsequent crash.

HOWEVER.

Yes, turbine blades are made of titanium. Titanium is strong, but it is brittle. And there are numerous cases of engines being destroyed by ingestion of foreign object debris. Here's a picture of what small FOD (in this case, a single bolt) can do when sucked in by a turbine.

Mercy-tech-N429MA-fod-060318-01cr-8.jpg


Remember, that was a bolt that passed into an engine, not propelled by anything other than engine intake suction. All that is necessary to destroy or shut down an engine is to crack or cause a severe imbalance in one or more of the compressor fans.

Speaking of which, please note this diagram.

turbparts.gif


The compressor fans compose much of the front half of the engine. The part that is open and not shielded at all on most airliner engine pods. Dump a bunch of copper .22s into one, and hey, look, excellent chance of a FOD kill. In fact, all it takes is a relatively minor impact to crack some fans. If memory serves, there was in the not too distant past a grounding of all planes at a major US airline due to some defective fans - caused when someone dropped a shipment a short distance and didn't report it or send the fans back - and yup, several of them were cracked and on their way to disintegrating.

Spectre, the only way you'll bring down a plane with a .22 is if you shoot it at very high altitude and cause a MAJOR explosive decompression. There have been instances of planes losing doors, even the whole fucking roof and landing safely. Are you gonna hit a plane at 35 thousand feet moving at 450 knots with a .22?

And here's where you show your ignorance of firearms as well - unless the .50 is mounted on an aircraft following or approaching the target, you can't hit a plane at 35,000 feet with one either.

Maximum level range of the .50 BMG is generally considered to be around 1600 meters, with the round travelling up to three times that range. That's nowhere near 35,000 feet. In fact, most armies no longer use .50 or the ex-Soviet-bloc .51 as vehicle air defense weapons against fixed-wing aircraft due to higher operational ceilings. That's what the 20+ mm cannon are for, now. The .50/.51s are now used against very low flying helicopters.

Not to mention many planes can fly without 1 engine and engines do not explode when they hit foreign objects.

You might know a lot about guns but I sure as hell know a lot about planes and trust me, you'd need a full Sopranos gang shooting 22s at a plane at takeoff to disable it if they're lucky.

You may know a bit about planes, but I'm not sure that you've read the original post setting up the conditions.

A Barret can disable a taxing airliner from quite a distance, if deployed correctly. That is indeed too much firepower for the cartels. Not that they don't have it already, wouldn't suprise me to see them using 50 cal machine guns.

While airliners do have quite a few redundancies, you don't need a .50 to stop a taxiing airliner. Unfortunately, I won't be able to give specifics as to what can be done with a weapon because I really don't want to entertain guests from DHS (they have no sense of humor) but I will make the following observations:

A .22 will go through aircraft fuselage aluminum like a white hot knife through butter.
Most airliner cockpits are not armored in any way save for the bulkheads behind and in front of the cockpit. The sides are not armored.
It is very difficult for a taxiing airliner to move out if the contents of the cockpit have been disabled by external projectiles. Plastic instrument casing isn't any better at stopping .22-class projectiles than the fuselage is.

I say again, you do not need a .50BMG to disable a taxiing airliner. And a .50BMG isn't going to be a lot more effective against an aircraft than a .22 without 'special' rounds (explosive, dual purpose, etc., etc.) not available on the US civilian market.

As for my own background with aircraft - I am working on my helicopter license as funds and time permit. FOD walks before starting up are standard issue, and I've seen some pretty graphic videos showing what happens to a turbine engine when it ingests FOD courtesy of my instructors. Crack the fan or even have a severe shaft imbalance and at the very least you have engine problems. It is very likely that you may have more parts shear off the fan, go further inside the engine and cause more damage. Worst case scenario, you have the disc fail and the blades go flying off in all directions.

This is what it looks like when a disc fails (in this case, an impeller disc, but compressor fan disc failure looks about the same, just at the front of the engine):
5.jpg.scaled500.jpg


You don't want to be anywhere nearby when that happens.

In terms of end result to functionality, pouring FOD into one end of an airliner turbine ends up kind of like what happens when a Torx bolt falls into a 5.9L Jeep engine. :D
 
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HOWEVER.

Yes, turbine blades are made of titanium. Titanium is strong, but it is brittle.
No, turbine blades are made of a nickel alloy. Compressor blades are made from titanium.

And there are numerous cases of engines being destroyed by ingestion of foreign object debris. Here's a picture of what small FOD (in this case, a single bolt) can do when sucked in by a turbine.

Remember, that was a bolt that passed into an engine, not propelled by anything other than engine intake suction.
Great picture.. but it's really not appropriate. It's an LTS101 fitted to a Bell 222. The bolt was not FOD in the conventional sense as the bolt was from the aircraft itself. Large foreign objects would not be able to reach the compressor face on that particular aircraft as a the inlet has a FOD guard. Furthermore the question was not if a .22 bullet could damage a small turboshaft engine, we were talking about airliners. It's a great picture but irrelevant.

please note this diagram.

The compressor fans compose much of the front half of the engine. The part that is open and not shielded at all on most airliner engine pods. Dump a bunch of copper .22s into one, and hey, look, excellent chance of a FOD kill.
It's a nice simplified picture of a jet engine, no question, but it isn't a bypass engine so there's no first fan stage and no bypass duct. That alone reduces the risk of any bullet hitting the fan face making it into the core engine (by a factor of up to 11).

In fact, all it takes is a relatively minor impact to crack some fans.
We're not talking about the small blades on the later compressor stages, we're taking about the front fan which is designed to withstand impacts from whatever rocks or crap gets sucked into the engine.

And here's where you show your ignorance of firearms as well - unless the .50 is mounted on an aircraft following or approaching the target, you can't hit a plane at 35,000 feet with one either. tl;dr

You may know a bit about planes, but I'm not sure that you've read the original post setting up the conditions.
I was framing the question in terms of take off and landing... otherwise why would you use the Concorde example?

A .22 will go through aircraft fuselage aluminum like a white hot knife through butter.

Most airliner cockpits are not armored in any way save for the bulkheads behind and in front of the cockpit. The sides are not armored.
It may amaze you to discover that the outer skin of an aircraft is not the only layer in use. Inside the outer skin is the blanketing layer made from kevlar. The actual instruments are contained within standard steel ATR cases (the same sort of case the black box is made from).

As for my own background with aircraft - I am working on my helicopter license as funds and time permit.
My own background is having a pilots license, a degree in aeronautical engineering and experience working in engine design.

This is what it looks like when a disc fails (in this case, an impeller disc, but compressor fan disc failure looks about the same, just at the front of the engine):
It's actually a turbine disk, not an impeller. A turbine disk failure is of sufficiently high energy that the casing is not expected to contain it. A compressor disk failure is expected to be contained. So they're "about the same" apart from being opposite.
 
The difference between a .22 and a 50 cal is that a .22 would have to be shot at high altitude for the aircraft to be stopped, that's what I said, whilst the 50 cal could disable an airliner, from significant distance, while taxiing or taking off.
I don't know where you're getting this ".22 will go through the side of a plane like hot knife on butter" but they're not that fragile. And even if it goes through you'd have to be pretty lucky to hit a circuit with absolutely no redundancy that would make the aircraft stop working. Even if you disabled 2 of the 3 on board computers it'd still fly.

This is what it looks like when a disc fails (in this case, an impeller disc, but compressor fan disc failure looks about the same, just at the front of the engine):
5.jpg.scaled500.jpg


You don't want to be anywhere nearby when that happens.

You forgot to mention this aircraft landed safely.

Also I want to point out the diagram of the engine you show there is the kind of jet engines fighters use, not modern airliners. Those use Low bypass turbofans, which have a large "outside" part of the engine where small debris are thrown towards by centripetal (or centrifugal? confuse the two) force such as rain, dust, little rocks, etc.

Turbofan3_Unlabelled.gif


Your petty .22 bullet would most likely get shot out the back with minor damage to the blades.
A 50 cal would be a total different matter.
 
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1. There are Tory MPs who'd enjoy being strapped to a big wheel like that after a bit of "cottaging".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/7674874.stm

2. It always struck me as very odd having a Federal Agency to combat Alcohol (Not illegal as far as I know in the US), Tobacco (Not illegal in the US again) and finally Firearms (Again all Americans have the right to most sorts of weapons). So you have a a special Police Force to combat stuff that is mostly legal? Odd.

The obvious point being that there are possibilities to carryout some criminal activity using some or all of the above, but that is why you have the FBI, State Troopers and Local Law Enforcement.
 
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Wait. The operation was called Operation Fast and Furious?

Seriously, the ATF should stop following Bow Wow's advice. Because just because he said you ain't in control unless you outta control doesn't mean that it's a good way to run an operation.
 
Sorry about the delay in getting back to this thread - I was working my arse off and arranging to buy another motorcycle.



Debunked already in the Gun thread (which is cross-linked already in this thread). No, they're not.

well, you go play in your gun thread or post your evidence. and the 90% maybe a bit high, but there are getting lots of guns from the USA.

And take the jet engine shit somewhere else too.
 
It's relevant as a discussion of the possible consequences of all these firearms going into the wrong hands I think.
 
WillDAQ, i salute you sir, as a fellow of the aviation industry, that post was pure win


And i am sorry spectre, but being someone who has worked on planes, their engines and some really interior parts, you are so wrong that it scares me that you are becoming a pilot, just because you read a bit and are studying to be a pilot does not give you the information you need...
 
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well, you go play in your gun thread or post your evidence. and the 90% maybe a bit high, but there are getting lots of guns from the USA.

And take the jet engine shit somewhere else too.

I wasn't the one who brought jets into this. Why don't you take it up with the people with an unrealistic expectation of what firearms can do?

Also, here's your refutation. Congratulations, you got suckered by a lying, spinning agenda-driven media. Again.

Mexico's Gun Supply and the 90 Percent Myth
February 10, 2011 | 0951 GMT
by Scott Stewart

For several years now, STRATFOR has been closely watching developments in Mexico that relate to what we consider the three wars being waged there. Those three wars are the war between the various drug cartels, the war between the government and the cartels, and the war being waged against citizens and businesses by criminals.

In addition to watching tactical developments of the cartel wars on the ground and studying the dynamics of the conflict among the various warring factions, we have also been paying close attention to the ways that both the Mexican and U.S. governments have reacted to these developments. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects to watch has been the way in which the Mexican government has tried to deflect responsibility for the cartel wars away from itself and onto the United States. According to the Mexican government, the cartel wars are not a result of corruption in Mexico or of economic and societal dynamics that leave many Mexicans marginalized and desperate to find a way to make a living. Instead, the cartel wars are due to the insatiable American appetite for narcotics and the endless stream of guns that flows from the United States into Mexico and that results in Mexican violence.

Interestingly, the part of this argument pertaining to guns has been adopted by many politicians and government officials in the United States in recent years. It has now become quite common to hear U.S. officials confidently assert that 90 percent of the weapons used by the Mexican drug cartels come from the United States. However, a close examination of the dynamics of the cartel wars in Mexico ? and of how the oft-echoed 90 percent number was reached ? clearly demonstrates that the number is more political rhetoric than empirical fact.

By the Numbers

As we discussed in a previous analysis, the 90 percent number was derived from a June 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report to Congress on U.S. efforts to combat arms trafficking to Mexico (see external link).

According to the GAO report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican authorities in 2008. Of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.

e0bfe1b7321eea34045f17ac73feb84593116b85.jpg


This means that the 87 percent figure relates to the number of weapons submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF that could be successfully traced and not from the total number of weapons seized by Mexican authorities or even from the total number of weapons submitted to the ATF for tracing. In fact, the 3,480 guns positively traced to the United States equals less than 12 percent of the total arms seized in Mexico in 2008 and less than 48 percent of all those submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF for tracing. This means that almost 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the United States.

The remaining 22,800 firearms seized by Mexican authorities in 2008 were not traced for a variety of reasons. In addition to factors such as bureaucratic barriers and negligence, many of the weapons seized by Mexican authorities either do not bear serial numbers or have had their serial numbers altered or obliterated. It is also important to understand that the Mexican authorities simply don?t bother to submit some classes of weapons to the ATF for tracing. Such weapons include firearms they identify as coming from their own military or police forces, or guns that they can trace back themselves as being sold through the Mexican Defense Department?s Arms and Ammunition Marketing Division (UCAM). Likewise, they do not ask ATF to trace military ordnance from third countries like the South Korean fragmentation grenades commonly used in cartel attacks.

Of course, some or even many of the 22,800 firearms the Mexicans did not submit to ATF for tracing may have originated in the United States. But according to the figures presented by the GAO, there is no evidence to support the assertion that 90 percent of the guns used by the Mexican cartels come from the United States ? especially when not even 50 percent of those that were submitted for tracing were ultimately found to be of U.S. origin.

This point leads us to consider the types of weapons being used by the Mexican cartels and where they come from.

Types and Sources of Guns


To gain an understanding of the dynamics of the gun flow inside Mexico, it helps if one divides the guns seized by Mexican authorities from criminals into three broad categories ? which, incidentally, just happen to represent three different sources.

Type 1: Guns Legally Available in Mexico

The first category of weapons encountered in Mexico is weapons available legally for sale in Mexico through UCAM. These include handguns smaller than a .357 magnum such as .380 and .38 Special.

A large portion of this first type of guns used by criminals is purchased in Mexico, or stolen from their legitimate owners. While UCAM does have very strict regulations for civilians to purchase guns, criminals will use straw purchasers to obtain firearms from UCAM or obtain them from corrupt officials. Cartel hit men in Mexico commonly use .380 pistols equipped with sound suppressors in their assassinations. In many cases, these pistols are purchased in Mexico, the suppressors are locally manufactured and the guns are adapted to receive the suppressors by Mexican gunsmiths.

It must be noted, though, that because of the cost and hassle of purchasing guns in Mexico, many of the guns in this category are purchased in the United States and smuggled into the country. There are a lot of cheap guns available on the U.S. market, and they can be sold at a premium in Mexico. Indeed, guns in this category, such as .380 pistols and .22-caliber rifles and pistols, are among the guns most commonly traced back to the United States. Still, the numbers do not indicate that 90 percent of guns in this category come from the United States.

Additionally, most of the explosives the cartels have been using in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Mexico over the past year have used commercially available Tovex, so we consider these explosives to fall in this first category. Mexican IEDs are another area where the rhetoric has been interesting to analyze, but we will explore this topic another time.

Type 2: Guns Legally Available in the U.S. but Not in Mexico

Many popular handgun calibers, such as 9 mm, .45 and .40, are reserved for the military and police and are not available for sale to civilians in Mexico. These guns, which are legally sold and very popular in the United States, comprise our second category, which also includes .50-caliber rifles, semiautomatic versions of assault rifles like the AK-47 and M16 and the FN Five-Seven pistol.

When we consider this second type of guns, a large number of them encountered in Mexico are likely purchased in the United States. Indeed, the GAO report notes that many of the guns most commonly traced back to the United States fall into this category. There are also many .45-caliber and 9 mm semiautomatic pistols and .357 revolvers obtained from deserters from the Mexican military and police, purchased from corrupt Mexican authorities or even brought in from South America (guns made by manufacturers such as Taurus and Bersa). This category also includes semiautomatic variants of assault rifles and main battle rifles, which are often converted by Mexican gunsmiths to be capable of fully automatic fire.

One can buy these types of weapons on the international arms market, but one pays a premium for such guns and it is cheaper and easier to simply buy them in the United States or South America and smuggle them into Mexico. In fact, there is an entire cottage industry that has developed to smuggle such weapons, and not all the customers are cartel hit men. There are many Mexican citizens who own guns in calibers such as .45, 9 mm, .40 and .44 magnum for self-defense ? even though such guns are illegal in Mexico.

Type 3: Guns Not Available for Civilian Purchase in Mexico or the U.S.

The third category of weapons encountered in Mexico is military-grade ordnance not generally available for sale in the United States or Mexico. This category includes hand grenades, 40 mm grenades, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), automatic assault rifles and main battle rifles and light machine guns.

This third type of weapon is fairly difficult and very expensive to obtain in the United States, especially in the large numbers in which the cartels are employing them. They are also dangerous to obtain in the United States due to heavy law enforcement scrutiny. Therefore, most of the military ordnance used by the Mexican cartels comes from other sources, such as the international arms market ? increasingly from China via the same networks that furnish precursor chemicals for narcotics manufacturing ? or from corrupt elements in the Mexican military or even deserters who take their weapons with them. Besides, items such as South Korean fragmentation grenades and RPG-7s, often used by the cartels, simply are not in the U.S. arsenal. This means that very few of the weapons in this category come from the United States.

In recent years the cartels, especially their enforcer groups such as Los Zetas, Gente Nueva and La Linea, have been increasingly using military weaponry instead of sporting arms. A close examination of the arms seized from the enforcer groups and their training camps clearly demonstrates this trend toward military ordnance, including many weapons not readily available in the United States. Some of these seizures have included M60 machine guns and hundreds of 40 mm grenades obtained from the military arsenals of countries like Guatemala.

But Guatemala is not the only source of such weapons. Latin America is awash in weapons that were shipped there over the past several decades to supply the various insurgencies and counterinsurgencies in the region. When these military-grade weapons are combined with the rampant corruption in the region, they quickly find their way into the black arms market. The Mexican cartels have supply-chain contacts that help move narcotics to Mexico from South America, and they are able to use this same network to obtain guns from the black market in South and Central America and then smuggle them into Mexico. While there are many weapons in this category that were manufactured in the United States, the overwhelming majority of the U.S.-manufactured weapons of this third type encountered in Mexico ? like LAW rockets and M60 machine guns ? come into Mexico from third countries and not directly from the United States.

There are also some cases of overlap between classes of weapons. For example, the FN Five-Seven pistol is available for commercial purchase in the United States, but the 5.7x28 armor-piercing ammunition for the pistol favored by the cartels is not ? it is a restricted item. However, some of the special operations forces units in the Mexican military are issued the Five-Seven as well as the FN P90 personal defense weapon, which also shoots the 5.7x28 round, and the cartels are obtaining some of these weapons and the armor-piercing ammunition from them and not from the United States. Conversely, we see bulk 5.56 mm and 7.62 mm ammunition bought in the United States and smuggled into Mexico, where it is used in fully automatic AK-47s and M16s purchased elsewhere. As noted above, China has become an increasingly common source for military weapons like grenades and fully automatic assault rifles in recent years.

To really understand Mexico?s gun problem, however, it is necessary to recognize that the same economic law of supply and demand that fuels drug smuggling into the United States also fuels gun smuggling into Mexico. Black market guns in Mexico can fetch up to 300 percent of their normal purchase price ? a profit margin rivaling the narcotics the cartels sell. Even if it were somehow possible to hermetically seal the U.S.-Mexico border and shut off all the guns coming from the United States, the cartels would still be able to obtain weapons elsewhere ? just as narcotics would continue to flow into the United States from other places. The United States does provide cheap and easy access to certain types of weapons and ammunition, but as demonstrated by groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, weapons can be easily obtained from other sources via the black arms market ? albeit at a higher price.

There has clearly been a long and well-documented history of arms smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border, but it is important to recognize that, while the United States is a significant source of certain classes of weapons and ammunition, it is by no means the source of 90 percent of the weapons used by the Mexican cartels, as is commonly asserted.

Reprinting or republication of this report on websites is authorized by prominently displaying the following sentence, including the hyperlink to STRATFOR, at the beginning or end of the report.

Mexico's Gun Supply and the 90 Percent Myth is republished with permission of STRATFOR."

Only a small fraction of weapons being used in Mexico were tracable to civilian sales in the US. Additional info (and the link to the GAO information used to generate the report) is available at the source link.

The "90% of weapons in Mexico came from the US" meme is bull.

The difference between a .22 and a 50 cal is that a .22 would have to be shot at high altitude for the aircraft to be stopped, that's what I said, whilst the 50 cal could disable an airliner, from significant distance, while taxiing or taking off.
I don't know where you're getting this ".22 will go through the side of a plane like hot knife on butter" but they're not that fragile. And even if it goes through you'd have to be pretty lucky to hit a circuit with absolutely no redundancy that would make the aircraft stop working. Even if you disabled 2 of the 3 on board computers it'd still fly.

I do know that I didn't say that said aircraft landed safely, but that was pretty obvious. I couldn't find the pics of the American commercial flight where a fan came apart in flight and the blades were slung all over creation in the time I had available, so I was using it as an example of the possible destruction.

Also, while I can't get more specific about things without inviting a visit from DHS, let me put it to you this way. It's not the inorganic components in the cockpit that are necessarily critical.

Also I want to point out the diagram of the engine you show there is the kind of jet engines fighters use, not modern airliners. Those use Low bypass turbofans, which have a large "outside" part of the engine where small debris are thrown towards by centripetal (or centrifugal? confuse the two) force such as rain, dust, little rocks, etc.

Turbofan3_Unlabelled.gif


Your petty .22 bullet would most likely get shot out the back with minor damage to the blades.
A 50 cal would be a total different matter.

And i am sorry spectre, but being someone who has worked on planes, their engines and some really interior parts, you are so wrong that it scares me that you are becoming a pilot, just because you read a bit and are studying to be a pilot does not give you the information you need...

One problem with these assertations is that I happen to know some of the engineers who design these engines. FordCrusherGT, for example, a member on this very board, is a friend of mine and a pilot who when he's not flying around in things like Sikorsky S-92s, is an engineer working in Lycoming's engine design and testing division. I also know a couple of guys over at Pratt&Whitney/UTC/whatever they're calling themselves this week, who worked on the PW4000 project. After 9/11 we kicked the idea around and I'm just repeating their conclusions at the time. Perhaps I've misphrased things a bit, but it all boiled down to 'any modern firearm can disable a turbine with multiple hits in the right place.'

I tend to trust the guys who design the things to know what they're talking about in general until they prove otherwise.

As for all you people saying that a .22LR won't go through aircraft aluminum, how about some empirical evidence? http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=463263

CCI Velocitor, .22LR from 40 feet (which is an achievable distance at two or three of the local airports)
DSC01994.JPG


Aguila Supermax:
DSC01996.JPG


CCI Stinger (one of the most common .22LRs around, you can buy it from Walmart in huge quantities):
DSC01998.JPG
 
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One problem with these assertations is that I happen to know some of the engineers who design these engines. FordCrusherGT, for example, a member on this very board, is a friend of mine and a pilot who when he's not flying around in things like Sikorsky S-92s, is an engineer working in Lycoming's engine design and testing division. I also know a couple of guys over at Pratt&Whitney/UTC/whatever they're calling themselves this week, who worked on the PW4000 project. After 9/11 we kicked the idea around and I'm just repeating their conclusions at the time. Perhaps I've misphrased things a bit, but it all boiled down to 'any modern firearm can disable a turbine with multiple hits in the right place.'
The key really is the right place part. Small calibre weapons won't penetrate many layers of the aircraft so reducing the number of important things they hit. Even if they do find something important they're unlikely to cause as much damage.

There is of course a difference with helicopters, if nothing else a well aimed shot to the gearbox potentially means no oil and a very rushed landing. All the delicate systems in a helicopter are crammed together in one place. (if you want to cause trouble, ask your Ford' how the S92 handles oil loss!).

I tend to trust the guys who design the things to know what they're talking about in general until they prove otherwise.
To quote Gene Kranz "I don't care about what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do. " People have been taking pot shot at airliners for years and while it's the sort of failure case that the designers can never take account of, they have never the less proved to be surprisingly robust.

As for all you people saying that a .22LR won't go through aircraft aluminum, how about some empirical evidence? http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=463263
I agree here, it'll go through most aircraft skins. With the probable exception of the wing upper and lower skins which are 2"+ thick in places.
 
I really would love to go into depth with how I believe said airliners are vulnerable, but after the two shithead incidents linked below, the FBI and Secret Service have basically said they're monitoring all local internet traffic into and out of Dallas; I am singularly uninterested in having a discussion with those agencies or DHS - I've already had a couple of interviews with DHS in the course of my contracts and have no desire to repeat the experience in a more hostile setting. If you read the links, you can probably understand why. These incidents are why I have not gone into exhaustive details. Sorry. :(

Shithead number one: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/26/national/main6522078.shtml
http://forum.purseblog.com/up-to-the-minute/terrorist-bomb-attempt-thwarted-in-dallas-510719.html

And here's shithead number two: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/saudi-man-charged-with-us-bomb-attempt-2224647.html
 
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