It didn’t take long for new and troubling questions to start popping up around “miraculous” US Airways flight 1549. Even the mainstream liberals at Talking Points Memo are saying that this one is “not to be believed“, and Josh Marshall has a point:

Every time I’ve boarded a plane over the years and gotten that speech about how, after the plane goes down in the ocean, we’ll grab our flotation seat cushions, walk down the aisle and hop into the inflatable boats, it’s always been with a mix of terror and gallows incredulity that I’ve thought to myself: “Right.” So when I saw this amazing turn of events, I started thinking: Has anyone ever pulled something like this off before? Last night on the local news, a reporter said this was the first time in the history of American aviation that a pilot (presumably of a large commercial craft) has ditched a plane in the water and escaped any fatalities.

What are the odds of birdstrike? What are the odds that one of the largest aircraft engines in the world could be disabled when jet engines are designed to chew up chickens like a Great Dane eating a mallomar? What are the odds of this happening twice? Where is the smoking gun goose? How likely is it for this to happen in January, when bird migration is most common between April and October? Isn’t “cruise missile” a much simpler and more likely explanation? The government has everything to lose and nothing to gain by revealing the real explanation.

Why would an Airbus crash less than 24 hours after Airbus overtook Boeing, the week of Obama’s inauguration, and four hours before George Bush’s final press conference? Why were there no Jews among the 155 passengers? Were they warned? What are the odds of this happening just off 50th street in Manhattan, two miles from Ground Zero? What are the odds that the pilot, Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, a forty year veteran of the government and military, would be the same person who designed the CRM procedures that would be used in this emergency?

And what about the crash itself? The “official story” says the plane’s engines went out over the Bronx. How did the plane get all the way over to the Hudson River? The glide ratio of an A320 at full speed is 20:1, the engines went out at 1000 meters. How did this plane make a wide circle around Manhattan and get all the way downtown? Why did the pilot discuss landing at La Guardia or Teterboro, then all radio transmissions stops without the pilot saying anything about ditching in the river? Why would they want to land in Teterboro, the airport where New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle took off from before crashing into an apartment in Manhattan on October 11, 2006 – the third Yankee player in the last three decades to die flying a plane?

What about the recovery? How did dozens of boats reach the plane so quickly – as if they were warned? Why are there no close-up photographs of the plane, only distant shots showing telltale photoshop artifacts? Why are they leaving the “black boxes” in the plane until it’s raised? Why are NYPD divers – not Navy, not Coast Guard, not NTSB – checking the wrecked plane? Is it because the NYPD deals not with disasters but with crime scenes? Why is Kathryn O. Higgins, the transportation board investigator, so flippant when she says, “The left engine is not there; it’s somewhere. We’ve got to go find that.” Why would she say this when both engines are missing? How could a force be so strong that it rips the engines off the plane but leaves the wings intact for passengers to walk on?

And what kind of sadistic demon would call the sound of crying children in the middle of an airplane crash “the best sound you can hear“? Isn’t that the sort of thing you’d expect Osama Bin Laden would say? I’ll tell you who: Vincent Lucante, a top-level “captain” of the New York Waterway, owned and operated by the same Port Authority that owned the World Trade Center before they “pulled it“. Ferry and air captains who have everything to gain from convincing commuters that ferries and planes are a much better transportation alternative to highways, especially overpasses, which are notoriously likely to be destroyed by gasoline tanker “fires”.

Other brave souls are beginning to see the light already. If this doesn’t convince the sheep that something stinks to high heaven I don’t know what will.