A charter plane carrying 19 people on a flight from Atlantic City New Jersey crashed in Pennsylvania today as it attempted
Posted in General on 21. Aug, 2010
A charter plane carrying 19 people on a flight from Atlantic City, New Jersey, crashed in Pennsylvania today as it attempted to land in light rain at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport.
A fire and wreckage were spotted in a heavily wooded area about nine miles south of the airport in northeastern Pennsylvania. There were no signs of survivors, said Joe Thomas, manager of Luzerne County emergency system.”The weather was bad, it was windy and there was some precipitation. The visibility was poor,” said Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Tammy Jones.Ms Jones said it appeared that both the plane’s engines had failed. She said investigators found a ball of fire at the scene.Emergency crews began searching along the planned flight path of the plane as soon as they were notified shortly after 3.30pm (UK time) that it would not reach the airport, said Ron Rome, spokesman for the county’s emergency service. The wreckage was spotted about an hour later.”My understanding, from talking to people at the scene, is there are no survivors,” Mr Rome said.Seventeen passengers and two crew members were aboard, Ms Jones added.The twin-engine turbo prop was attempting to land when it apparently developed some kind of mechanical problem, said Wy Gowell, assistant director at the airport.”There was an indication there was a mechanical problem, that’s all we can say,” he said.Peter Hartt, spokesman for South Jersey Transportation Authority, which operates the Atlantic City Airport, said the plane was operated by Executive Airlines. He said it left the city about 2,30pm (UK time) and was scheduled to land in Wilkes-Barre an hour later.Mr Hartt said the airline typically runs casino charters, but he did not know who was aboard.The 1988 BA-31 Jetstream disappeared from radar about 3.40pm (UK time) during a second instrument approach, typically performed if the visibility is poor or if there is a low cloud deck.. Monday nights can be pretty uneventful in Provo, Utah, in the heart of America’s Mormon country Unless, that is, you join Fight Club.
Monday nights can be pretty uneventful in Provo, Utah, in the heart of America’s Mormon country. Unless, that is, you join Fight Club.
For several weeks, testosterone-laden young men from Provo’s two universities, Brigham Young and Utah Valley State College, have been meeting in secret, stripping to the waist and pummelling each other senseless to the cheers and yelps of their peers.At first they met in college dorms, staging fights as a natural extension of initiation rites, but when the crowd reached unmanageable proportions they moved to parks, warehouses – anywhere they could inflict bruises, draw blood, and be noisy without drawing too much attention.”Looking for bloody violence with a friendly twist?” asks the club’s website. “Fight Club: where friends continue to gather to enjoy a relaxing beating.”If it sounds awfully like the recent movie Fight Club, in which Ed Norton and Brad Pitt form the men’s club to end all men’s clubs and beat the hell out of each other, that’s probably not a coincidence. The film imagined a world in which uncaged masculine aggression could act as a remedy for the pampered ennui of the modern world, and that’s the fantasy students have been acting out.”There’s a part of every man that wants to fight and prove himself,” said one of the founders of the Provo Fight Club, a Brigham Young student who goes by the nom de guerre Black Avenger. “The Fight Club is a quick release outlet for the beast within us all,” he added.The fighters are paired according to size, height, weight and experience. They fight three 45-second rounds and have to adhere to a few basic rules of boxing etiquette – although more than once the punches have kept flying long after the referee has told the fighters to stop. Participants wear gloves and mouth guards – but that doesn’t stop them from getting badly dusted up.
Blood flows pretty liberally, according to people who have attended the fights, and knocked-out fighters often land head-first on concrete.This is hardly peace-and-brotherhood Mormon behaviour, and the local authorities have been scratching their heads to make Fight Club go away. Trouble is, the fighting itself is not illegal as long as it is consensual. It is not even against the honour code of either of the city’s universities.So local politicians have had to take another route – issuing ordinances banning Fight Club from city property and stipulating that any meeting requires written permission from the mayor, the presence of a doctor, adequate crowd-control measures and toilet facilities. Violators face a $1,000 fine, or six months in jail.”I’d like to thank Brad Pitt and Hollywood for putting this stupid idea in these kids’ faces,” the mayor of Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Provo, said last week.As in the film, the first rule of Fight Club is that nobody talks about Fight Club. But Fight Club members are angry at attempts to curb or sanitise their activities. “Instead of lushing it up at a liquor store, we have turned to a sport, and now they want to create a Communist-like club with Red guards monitoring our every move,” a fighter known as The Badger said.”Unless it’s Scripture study, baking bread or ice-cream socials, these withered ultra-conservatives will abuse their power and overstep their bounds until they eliminate every avenue of recreation that didn’t find its birth in their distant and dying generation,” added Black Avenger.Such rhetoric is infecting new groups of fighters, including local high school students.