Breaking: Small Plane Crashes into Austin Building

[elfismiles]

DBC, I think the timeline may go something like this...

Distraught man sees news reports of small plane crash and begins writing his last words as another small plane crash news report cycle begins. (New Jersey crash / Palo Alto crash)

Maybe he was just contemplating the possibility when he started but then has a fight with his wife and she leaves taking the kid. Depression and anxieties deepen.

News cycles still going strong reporting small plane crashes.

Thursday morning he sets fire to the home, heads to the airport.

Folks at airport see and recognize him and probably note that he leaves without filing a flight-plan which is totally legal... for now.

Within minutes of the fire starting the fire department arrives and ascertains the names of those who live there. They find out he is a pilot and literally live on air the local news people start to put two and two together (see my previous post about that).

Is it possible there is much more to all of this? Hell yeah! How likely is this more than just one man going over the edge? Possible though I'm not yet convinced its probable.

EDIT: add to this the recent incident with Amy Bishop and it all fits the Copycat Effect to a Tee.

[Uncle $cam]

Information trickled in very slowly. It didn't seem, to me, that he was immediately identified. Identification took a little while.

I don't know, I'm mountain time, and it seems to me he had been identified by just before noon here, which is what? An hours difference from Austin?

[JackRiddler]

What does this have to do with CA? Am I missing something? He had moved from CA to TX years ago. The plane was hangared and took off from an Austin airport.

[elfismiles]

Don't forget the Pirelli Building in Milan, April 2002 (reported as accident)

A single propeller Rockwell Commander A112 piloted by a 68-year-old Swiss man hit the 26th floor of the 32 story Pirelli Tower (415ft/127m high) tower in an apparent accident at 5:48 pm, 18 minutes after take off. The crash killed the pilot and at least three other people. Sixty more people sustained injuries in the building and on the ground. The tower, located near Milan's central train station, is one of the world's tallest concrete buildings. http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/euro ... aly.milan/

Thanks for that one Jack. I'd forgotten that one.

[elfismiles]

What does this have to do with CA? Am I missing something? He had moved from CA to TX years ago. The plane was hangared and took off from an Austin airport.

I think DB just thinks its extremely weird that AJStack hadn't updated his aircraft info with the FAA.

My dad is a pilot so I can inquire as to whether that is particularly anomalous or not.

[elfismiles]

Not sure exactly when this aired (is the time stamp on the video visible?) or if it was the first public connecting of the two incidents...

EDIT: looks like this aired right about 11:30am CST.

At about the 3:40 mark in this video is where these news hounds first start to hear of a connection between the house fire and the plane crash...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGlo5iKRQ9s

[elfismiles]

The FBI Didn't Take Down Austin Plane Crash Pilot Joe Stack's Online Manifesto

Lawrence Delevingne | Feb. 18, 2010, 5:44 PM

Update 2: T35 has changed its note on the site to no longer make reference to an FBI request.

Update 1: Melen of T35 stands by his claim. "The FBI did call me and ask that I take down the site," he tells us. "I am not sure if you'd call it a request, recommendation, or suggestion, but that's what happened."
--

Who took down Joe Stack's online manifesto?

The pilot who flew his small plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas this morning wrote a suicide note on his former business domain http://embeddedart.com (pictured here).

But shortly after the site attracted national attention, a note from the hosting company, T35 Hosting, went up in place of the text at 2:30 pm:

This website has been taken offline due to the sensitive nature of the events that transpired in Texas this morning and in compliance with a request from the FBI. To see an archived version of the original letter, please go here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/ye ... tack1.html.

Problem is, the FBI doesn't make such requests.

FBI spokesman Special Agent Eric Vasys in San Antonio tells us "the FBI does not request that sites remove language such as being reported to be authored by Mr. Stack. That's not our area to do that."

On the contrary, Vasys adds: "In similar investigations, requests are made that electronic records be maintained for investigative purposes and not be destroyed or erased."

That contradicts what Alex Melen, who is listed as the president and founder of T35, noted in a forum post today that "The fbi requests were made over the phone."

It's not clear if the call was a hoax or if Melen is finding an excuse to shut down an overloaded server.

As he posted, the traffic was crippling:

Joe went over his bandwidth limits in just a few minutes today actually. I personally credited his account with an extra $500 of bandwidth to keep his site up. Even though it was just a text page, it was still close to 100kb in size, and when multiplied by over 10,000,000 hits (in the last 2 hours), that's still enough to bring a server down and use hundreds of GB of bandwidth.

And this:

I'm not going to really comment on the event specifically.. but just wanted to say that Joe was a customer with us for a long time (over 6 years) and had never had any issues. Always paid his bills on time, always a good customer. I'm still really shocked by everything that happened.

Melen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

http://www.businessinsider.com/who-took ... sto-2010-2

[dbcooper41]

What does this have to do with CA? Am I missing something? He had moved from CA to TX years ago. The plane was hangared and took off from an Austin airport.

the plane found in the wreckage was registered to andrew stack in lincoln, ca.
i'm wondering about how they 1)identified the plane in the burning wreckage, 2) after finding it was registered to stack in ca, why didn't they report it as "the plane is registered to ....". instead it was "the pilot has been identified".
doesn't that seem a little unusual?
the explanations offered are perfectly reasonable, and probably what happened. but.....

there are widely varying accounts of the house fire, with witness names. why?

also, from witness accounts and the ferocity of the fire, it sounds like his house may have been wired with explosives.
the timeline between the initial fire reports and his take off is very tight, possible but tight. hardly leaves time to top off his tank as was reported. of course he could have used timers(he was a controls guy) and been out of the house by 8:00am with plenty of time.

also, it seems mighty quickly that they proclaimed he was the pilot, who had set fire to his house before taking off. mighty fast arson investigation!

also, witness accounts at the crash site sure seem to suggest an explosion. i'm not an expert on small planes flying into buildings but, that was a helluva boom.

and the pics of the building look like many windows might have been boarded up. was construction going on in the area hit by any chance? it would help explain the low casualty count.
obviously i question everything, to an annoying degree. sorry, i can't help myself sometimes.

[dbcooper41]

Who took down Joe Stack's online manifesto?

i think an even better question was asked yesterday, "how did we become aware of his website so quickly? it was mighty obscure."

also, does anyone know about this "businessinsider.com? they seem to have broken alot of the tidbits on this story.

[elfismiles]

I think I know this guy ... was just alerted to a bandmate's name in the media reports whom I know. Inquiring.

!

Someone who says he was in a band with Joe Stack has a thread running at DU. Member with high number of posts:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 89x7747831

His name was Joe Stack
I won't defend what he did because there's no defense of it, but Joe wasn't a teabagger he wasn't left or right wing. He very obviously had some serious problems and it's a real tragedy especially for the innocent victims, but the manifesto was all over the board politically.
Joe played in my band for about 3 years and was mostly apolitical.
I hate what he did and had no idea at the level of dispair he was feeling.

I've now spent the last 30 hours answering questions about what he was like. He obviously cracked....severly, but any political militancy he had was recent and seems to suggest mental illness rather than activism.

Again I'm not defending what he did I'm just telling you what it looks like from my end.

[Howling Rainbows]

dbcooper41:
how exactly did they identify him so fast? looks like the tail numbers would be a little hard to read under the circumstances.
plus, it was registered in california, so why associate it with a house fire in austin so quickly? he didn't file a flight plan and he didn't make any contact with the FAA. so how did they associate him with the event so quickly?
the early reports even had the wrong model plane and had his burning house in waco.(willful misinfo?)

and does it seem strange that after the plane was identified as belonging to him, he was proclaimed the pilot instead of the "registered owner"?



Possibly by triangulating a GPS signal that his cell phone was putting out? Maybe they cross referenced cell phone GPS records and back tracked his phone locations to the plane and his house? I could see a scenario in my head where that might be possible using computers to crunch the data. Maybe the feds can differentiate between phones flying and driving because phones flying are not following highways?

[dbcooper41]

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/ ... ries/fire/

Fire | The Blotter SUBSCRIBE TODAY

Home > The Blotter > Archives > Fire category
Fire
February 18, 2010
Burned house, plane crash linked to same person

Fire crews responded this morning to a fire at the home of a person who owned a
plane that crashed into a Northwest Austin office building. The house, in the 1800 block of Dapplegrey Lane close to Parmer Lane and Metric
Boulevard, was owned by Andrew Joseph Stack, records show.
There were no injuries in the blaze, and the house is total loss, officials
said.

Neighbors said they heard a loud noise that sounded like a car crash at about
9:15 a.m. and soon saw flames coming from house.
Neighbor Elbert Hutchins said he ran to the house while calling 911 and saw
flames coming out of an upstairs window. Soon he saw a woman and a girl drive up
in a car.
Neighbors believe that was Stack’s wife and daughter, who is about 12 years old.

so "Elbert Hutchins" implies the wife and child were elsewhere when the fire started with a "loud noise".

The two are now believed to be in a neighbor’s house being assisted by the Red
Cross. When reporters went to the door, an FBI agent answered.
A Red Cross spokewoman would only say they are assisting two people who are
“remarkably calm, clearly distraught.” She said they are “physically fine.”

they were being taken care of by the red cross and the FBI.
and they were "remarkably calm, clearly distraught.”
not sure how you can tell someone is "cleary distraught" when they are "remarkably calm".

Dane Vick, whose home is behind Stack’s house, said he called 911 to report the
house fire. He described it as an explosion. “I heard a humongous boom,” he
said. Vick said he went to the house and yelled, “Anyone in there. Everyone OK?”
“There was no movement,” he said.He described the neighborhood as being made up of professionals and families.

sounds like an explosion and an empty house.

Joseph Strazza, 22-year-old contractor, said he was driving down Metric
Boulevard when he saw smoke coming out of the eaves of the house.
He parked behind house, he said, then heard an explosion.
“It sounded like a small bomb going off,” Strazza said. He said the windows blew
out and flames started coming out of the roof.
Strazza said he then saw a man running out of house with little girl in his
arms. Fire crews arrived a short time later, Strazza said.

sounds like an explosion and a not-so-empty house.
and who is he refering to here?

Strazza said he then saw a man running out of house with little girl in his arms.

it couldn't have been stack cuz he had a 9:40 flight to catch and he was 21 miles, 26 minutes from the airport.
any pilots got an estimation for the minimum time needed to get a plane out of the hangar, get the plane topped off, cranked and in the air?
http://www.mapquest.com/maps?1c=Austin& ... S:M:/bl:/e



3 named witnesses; Joseph Strazza, Dane Vick, Elbert Hutchins and 3 different stories.

[dbcooper41]

Howling Rainbows

Possibly by triangulating a GPS signal that his cell phone was putting out? Maybe they cross referenced cell phone GPS records and back tracked his phone locations to the plane and his house? I could see a scenario in my head where that might be possible using computers to crunch the data. Maybe the feds can differentiate between phones flying and driving because phones flying are not following highways?

wouldn't they need to know which cellphone to triangulate on?
i'd assume his was no longer working after slamming into the building.
if it was still working i see a product endorsement in the near future (btw, he did work on "hardened displays for the military)
once they found out who owned the plane they would be looking for a cellphone owner who lives in california.
hard to imagine they could track back to austin that fast.
and with the highway nearby there must be hundreds of cellphones passing by.
which to track?

[Nordic]

It's also slightly hard for me to readily believe that a man would spend so much time writing up a manifesto like the one Stacks did. Suicide notes, if any are left at all, are usually very brief and to the point. Psychologically the act of committing yourself to suicide days in advance is somewhat rare. Fits of rage that would trigger something like flying a plane into a building aren't normally that elongated - by that time the victim in question has had the time to settle down into some form of rational thought.

So we have a seven page manifesto that took two days to compose. The manifesto resonates anger and frustrations, certainly - but I would tend to think most who fly into a non-cognitive fit of rage would be a little less articulate given the flurry of emotion, don't you?

The man was a computer engineer, no less. It appears by his listing of projects that they were pretty credible. I live with an engineer and have one in the family - they tend to be frustratingly methodical when it comes to, well, everything.

Well, take another look at what you just wrote.

I have engineers in my family, too, tons of them, including my father. And yes, they are frustratingly methodical to say the least.

The guy's M.O. fits perfectly with being a methodical engineer. Spend two days writing the note. Researching exactly where you want the plane to hit. Probably calculated how much fuel would make so much "boom".

There's no "fit of rage" here like you describe. Instead a breaking point was reached, transcended, and a decision was made, and once beyond that psychological rubicon, he just carried out the plane like he'd carry out any other plan. Methodically.

I'm not ruling anything out, I never do, but I don't see anything odd about this guy's actions versus his background and character.

A lot of people are very close to the breaking point in this country. A lot of them. I'm surprised, actually, that more of this hasn't happened.

Which, if it was a false flag, could have been the purpose of it, simply to have people who are close to snapping go "oh yeah, that's what it would look like if I did ________. Not so great".

Then again, this thing could be a spark for a LOT of people. We may see a lot of copycat stuff in the next couple of weeks or so.

[Nordic]

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/fire/

Fire | The Blotter SUBSCRIBE TODAY

Home > The Blotter > Archives > Fire category
Fire
February 18, 2010
Burned house, plane crash linked to same person

Fire crews responded this morning to a fire at the home of a person who owned a
plane that crashed into a Northwest Austin office building. The house, in the 1800 block of Dapplegrey Lane close to Parmer Lane and Metric
Boulevard, was owned by Andrew Joseph Stack, records show.
There were no injuries in the blaze, and the house is total loss, officials
said.

Neighbors said they heard a loud noise that sounded like a car crash at about
9:15 a.m. and soon saw flames coming from house.
Neighbor Elbert Hutchins said he ran to the house while calling 911 and saw
flames coming out of an upstairs window. Soon he saw a woman and a girl drive up
in a car.
Neighbors believe that was Stack’s wife and daughter, who is about 12 years old.

so "Elbert Hutchins" implies the wife and child were elsewhere when the fire started with a "loud noise".

The two are now believed to be in a neighbor’s house being assisted by the Red
Cross. When reporters went to the door, an FBI agent answered.
A Red Cross spokewoman would only say they are assisting two people who are
“remarkably calm, clearly distraught.” She said they are “physically fine.”

they were being taken care of by the red cross and the FBI.
and they were "remarkably calm, clearly distraught.”
not sure how you can tell someone is "cleary distraught" when they are "remarkably calm".

Dane Vick, whose home is behind Stack’s house, said he called 911 to report the
house fire. He described it as an explosion. “I heard a humongous boom,” he
said. Vick said he went to the house and yelled, “Anyone in there. Everyone OK?”
“There was no movement,” he said.He described the neighborhood as being made up of professionals and families.

sounds like an explosion and an empty house.

Joseph Strazza, 22-year-old contractor, said he was driving down Metric
Boulevard when he saw smoke coming out of the eaves of the house.
He parked behind house, he said, then heard an explosion.
“It sounded like a small bomb going off,” Strazza said. He said the windows blew
out and flames started coming out of the roof.
Strazza said he then saw a man running out of house with little girl in his
arms. Fire crews arrived a short time later, Strazza said.

sounds like an explosion and a not-so-empty house.
and who is he refering to here?

Strazza said he then saw a man running out of house with little girl in his arms.

it couldn't have been stack cuz he had a 9:40 flight to catch and he was 21 miles, 26 minutes from the airport.
any pilots got an estimation for the minimum time needed to get a plane out of the hangar, get the plane topped off, cranked and in the air?
http://www.mapquest.com/maps?1c=Austin& ... S:M:/bl:/e



3 named witnesses; Joseph Strazza, Dane Vick, Elbert Hutchins and 3 different stories.

I think all of this can easily be attributed to rushed and shoddy journalism.

Eyewitnesses aren't always the best, as everyone should know. I mean, a man driving down a street sees a housefire, then sees a man running with a little girl in his arms and assumes they're coming from the burning house ...... They quite easily were running from an adjacent house, or just about anywhere.

I'm not ruling anything out, it's just that "journalism" in moments like these doesn't have a real good track record for being accurate.

And this guy was by all accounts a very intelligent and methodical guy, and if he wanted to make a device that burned down his house after he left, well, it very likely would have had an explosive aspect to it. I mean, just a leaking propane tank in your living room with a burner going on the stove in your kitchen for instance. You leave the house, wait about twenty minutes and kaboom.