The 1975 LaGuardia Airport Bombing | Hacker News Reader

The 1975 LaGuardia Airport Bombing

observer.com

47 pointsmonort21 comments

Why do people classify this as terrorism? "Terrorism" is usually understood as violence where intended targets are not those killed, but mainly those who watch the news and shiver in fear. And to drive point home, terrorists usually explicitly explain, why do they want people to be afraid of them, and what do they want. Nothing like this happened in this case; so — why "terrorism" label in the first place?

Aside from the usual difficulties in defining a word so politically loaded, this is a problematic heuristic. The Pan Am Flight 103 bombing was claimed by at least three groups, before being traced back to Libya. Gaddafi, for his part, didn't acknowledge responsibility until 2003.

Here's another "fun" example. Some of our early uses of the term were to describe the KKK, which was and remains a terrorist organization par excellence. Except that the clandestine nature of the group, and thus the need for its members to lead superficially normal lives within the community, does not lend itself to claiming responsibility for attacks in the sense we associate with jihadist organizations. A classic example is the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, which was perpetrated. The communities targeted by Klan members don't need to know exactly who was responsible for the violence to have its intended effect.

> The communities targeted by Klan members don't need to know exactly who was responsible for the violence to have its intended effect.

Hm, you're right. So — the point is not to claim the responsibility, but to make sure that everyone knows what political message is there behind the violence. Which is still not something that applies in LaGuardia case.

It sure seems like the FBI has protected criminals in the past when they had the potential to give the Bureau information about other criminals. These suspicions were also raised in the Whitey Bulger case. I believe that this kind of behavior, from persons who are sworn to enforce the laws, is malfeasant and unacceptable.

The prosecution of the many outweighs the justice for the few?

I suspect that there were "good intentions" behind the FBI's behavior but things spiraled out of control and politically it was impossible to address it in any way other than making it disappear.

Understanding how it could happen doesn't make it any better.

> OTPOR did nothing to end Communism in Yugoslavia, but did succeed in tarring the Croatian cause with fanaticism, terrorism and murder.

I've always that that the Ustaše[1] did a pretty good job of tarring the Croatian cause.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e

You can hear the relevant CBS Evening News radio update at the beginning of this mp3, and again at the end (~1h:00m:41s in):

http://cbsrmt.thelongtrek.com/pp/CBSRMT%20-%20751229%200404%...

Edit:spelling

They need to just shut down the LaGuardia airport and sell the land off for development. It's silly to have 3 airports that close together, creating the busiest airspace in the US, especially when LGA is such a small (and old and crappy) airport anyway. Shut it down, expand service at Newark and JFK, and then improve the mass-transit service to both of those so people don't need to spend a bunch of money on stupid cabs just to get in or out of NYC by air.

Upvotes for expanding the transit options to both. It's absolutely embarrassing NYC doesn't have better ways to get to any of the three airports.

It's funny to me because most people I know would prefer to get in a car and gamble with sitting in traffic rather than take the easy, almost always on time subway (e.g. E train) + AirTrain to JFK. From midtown it is always 45 minutes door to terminal, but people avoid it for some reason because... ? It isn't a sparkly white JFK train that terminates in Manhattan?

Newark is served by train from Penn Station, already a massive hub, that gets you there in 15 minutes.

Chicago has great service to both airports. ~30 minutes to both o'Hare and Midway. So much better than dealing with the headache of a cab.

Why do they need to have a special train for each airport? What's so hard about putting them on the regular subway system so people don't need to pay a high fare and waste a lot of time in transfers and walking between stations with a ton of luggage? Have you even been to Penn Station? It's not a short walk from the trains to the subway. That's probably why a lot of people prefer cars.

I'm with you that LGA is crappy, but it's not that small. It's the 20th busiest airport in the United States, and handles 23% of the total NYC air traffic. Neither EWR nor JFK have enough spare capacity to pickup that slack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_i...

Well in that case, they should expand the other two. Things would probably be a lot more efficient in that airspace too after downsizing to only two airports.

If you end up with the same amount of traffic as before, just at two airports instead of three, how does it make the airspace more efficient?

Better centralization. Having three control towers having to coordinate traffic between them is more chaotic than two or one. And it's more orderly to have planes coming in to fewer sets of runways.

Having TRACON work with three towers instead of two doesn't sound any more difficult. I thought that the towers mostly just took already-sequenced traffic from TRACON and landed them, and handed departing traffic off to TRACON once they left the runway. As for fewer sets of runways, that sounds harder to me, not easier, since you have more traffic coming into the airport and that traffic has to be sequenced and deconflicted with all the other traffic coming into that particular airport.

I could be wrong on this, my interactions with ATC are limited to occasionally listening to DCA tower while watching the planes land, and every so often being the point of contact to call the local TRACON to notify them of our glider operations.

Fewer sets of runways seems like it should be easier, because the runways can be set up to be parallel to each other, so planes can all come in on the same approach and land in parallel. That's how they do it in Phoenix, with three parallel runways.

With more airports, you have planes all going different directions instead.

Besides, it seems like it'd be better to push some of that air traffic away from the city center, and free up some extremely valuable real estate. If they'd put in some better public transit to those two airports, people would be able to get in and out of the city a lot faster. Why can't they build actual subway lines to them anyway, instead of having to make slow and crappy, special trains to them which aren't on the main lines and then require time-consuming transfers?

Have you been to the refurbished Delta terminal? It is sparkling new with iPads for pre-paid food and drink ordering and charging at every seat.

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