Missile Attempt on American Airlines Flight

12/05/05: UPDATE: Bill Quick at Daily Pundit has an update on the apparent missile attack on an American Airlines jet out of LAX a week ago Sunday:

This morning I received an email from Tim Wagner, a spokesman for American Airlines. He told me that AA doesn't make their frontline employees available for interviews. However, he did provide further information on the sighting:

Check it out.

12/04/05 UPDATE: LakersTalk, The Common Room and Mrs Satan have joined the rumble. But it's been one week as of today, and not much more rumbling is going on as far as I can tell. *sigh* My wife and I fly out of LAX for Australia on Dec 16. Odds are we'll be fine. Still...

12/03/05: UPDATE: Bill Quick at Daily Pundit has posted an email from a passenger on that flight. If the email is accurate, the flight took place on Saturday, Nov 26, and the flight number was 612.

In a somewhat related story, two men are charged with attempting to import shoulder-fired missiles.

LOS ANGELES -- Two Southland men arrested in an FBI sting pleaded not guilty Monday to charges they conspired to import into the United States shoulder-fired missile systems used by the Chinese military.

Chao Tung Wu, a 51-year-old La Puente resident, and Yi Qing Chen, 41, of Rosemead, allegedly agreed to act as middlemen in acquiring surface-to-air QW- 2 missiles for an undercover agent.

The defendants had been taken into federal custody on drug and cigarette smuggling charges shortly before the prosecutors added the weapons charge -- the first ever filed under an anti-terrorism law enacted last December.

And you can add several more bloggers to the rumble mix: Political Yin/Yang, C.T.P, Spelunking Through The Chaos, Crazy Politico's Rantings, Classical Values, and Sunday Might Musings.

Crazy Politico points to a Washingon Post article today on Junkyard Dogs of Way, about the wonderful black market on weapons.

12/02/05: UPDATE: Daily Pundit called the FBI and they report that the investigation is closed because it turned out to be a contrail. The Jawa Report isn't buying it, and neither am I. If it's a contrail, where is the friggin' airplane that made it??? I think pilots see enough contrails that they know the difference between an old, dissolving line of water vapor and a MISSILE shooting up at them. Hard to mistake one for the other. That American Airlines pilot would be laughed out of a job. Sorry. The FBI will have to try again.

UPDATE: Little Green Footballs is now reporting the story. And now Drudge is linking to it as well.

UPDATE: Eric at Straight White Guy has commented that Instapundit says this has been debunked. No source is mentioned. I can't find one.

Meanwhile, I've found another radio station in Philadelphia that is reporting the story today a from copy apparently written on Monday. We now know it's flight 621 (actually, I think it's flight 612. The story reverses the numbers.):

Pilot Reports 'Missile' Fired at Jetliner Near LAX (11/28/05)

FBI agents and Homeland Security officials spent the weekend investigating the report of a possible missile fired at an American Airlines plane taking off from Los Angeles International Airport.

Sources tell ABC News the pilot of American Airlines Flight 621, en route to Chicago, radioed air traffic controllers after takeoff from LAX. He told them a missile had been fired at the aircraft and missed.

The plane was over water when the pilot said he saw a smoke trail pass by the cockpit.

FBI agents believe it was a flare or a bottle rocket, but say they may never know if that's what it actually was.

Update: I'll leave this post at the top into the weekend.

11/30/05: Update: The missile in question could be an SA-7 GRAIL. Maximum altitude 4500 meters (almost 15,000 feet). At an angle, less so. (HT Jordan at Daily Pundit.)
Update: Daily Pundit (who named the blogosphere) and Mover Mike are starting to rumble over this story. And Will at The Daily Snooze.

***

11/29/05: A pilot on an American Airlines flight out of LAX to Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend called the Tower to say that as they were climbing after takeoff at about 6600 feet they saw a rocket fly up past them and just miss the airplane. The FBI interviewed the pilots and have detemined that it was probably a flare or a bottle rocket.

I'm surprised that no blogs seem to be reporting this story. (Maybe that's what happens to blogs: If there is no link, there is no story.)

I've heard this report TWICE in the last couple of days on ABC News Radio, via KSFO in San Francisco. Lee Rodgers and Melanie Morgen are keeping if alive, trying to get more information. Homeland Security HAS confirmed to KSFO that "something" was fired at an American Airlines jet.

But EXCUSE MEEEE!!! A flare or a bottle rocket at 6600 FEET???

Fireworks make it up only a few hundred feet. I used to play with Estes model rockets. We would be happy to get up to 1500 feet.

6600 feet is OVER A MILE HIGH. Only a surface-to-air missile will launch that high.

This is being covered up and it's not the first time. Go here to read more.

PLEASE, PLEASE link to this. Maybe we can get more information if more blogs start a rumble. Homeland Security has no business keeping the lid on this.

If you can locate a story on the ABC News website (I still can't find one) or hear anything else on this, please let me know. I will post UPDATES below when something comes up. I will also keep this story at the top of my blog for at least a week!

UPDATE
Finally, a link. Here's another version of the story at the Northeast Intelligence Network (scroll down):

28 November 2005: Under normal circumstances and in a perfect world, a possible "missile attack" against a commercial flight in the early morning hours after a holiday weekend would be a news story. A BIG NEWS story. Sadly, today's climate does not demand comprehensive reporting, and even on rare occasions when it does, no one seems to want to ask the "hard questions" anymore.

[...]

That said, there is a "news story" that was broadcast on a few radio stations early this morning that detailed an alleged incident of a U.S. passenger plane departing from the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), enroute to the east coast, that (reportedly) "narrowly avoided being hit by a missile." The altitude of the flight at the time of the alleged incident was 6,000 feet and over the Pacific Ocean in a turn-and-climb pattern. According to news reports broadcast early this morning, officials dismissed this incident, even chalking the sighting up to a "flare" or a "bottle rocket," despite the obvious impossibility of either scenario. Interestingly, the details of the story remained vague until they apparently vanished from the media.

Since approximately 9:00 this morning, the Northeast Intelligence Network has received nine-(9) separate e-mails about this incident, yet aside from some very astute first person reporting at the very informative web site Free Republic, there has been no mention about this incident by anyone else on the Internet or in the media. Multiple posters on the Free Republic web site heard the same media reports cited by those who have sent e-mails to this agency, adding credibility to the initial news reports. Despite those fleeting news reports about a potentially devastating breach of national security and the possibility of a mass casualty event, there has been no media follow-up, and inquiries to the FAA by the Northeast Intelligence Network have not been answered as of this report.

[...]