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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

AFP is reporting that an eyewitness saw the aircraft on fire before the crash. If confirmed, that makes this quite difference circumstances to the Lion Air crash.

> An eyewitness told AFP the plane came down in flames. “The plane was already on fire when it crashed to the ground. The crash caused a big explosion,” Tegegn Dechasa recounted at the site. “I was near the river near the crash site. Shortly after the crash police and a fire crew from a nearby air force camp came and extinguished the plane’s flames on the ground.”

> He added: “The plane was in flames in its rear side shortly before the crash. The plane was swerving erratically before the crash.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/10/ethiopian-airl...

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With all respect to the witnesses, early eyewitness reports are notoriously unreliable. I remember reading the exact same thing about the plane that crashed in NYC shortly after 9/11. There were also many ‘eyewitnesses’ claiming to see the crash of the Malaysian airliner. This report may wind up to be substantiated, but I wouldn’t put any weight on it until then.

Also TWA 800, where many eyewitnesses saw a missile that was never there.

not sure if citing that as an example is such a good idea, considering everything surrounding it. You do have to reject an awful lot of evidence to claim with certainty there was never a missile.

They spent 4 years and $40M on the investigation which including recovering most of the fuselage from the Atlantic and reassembling it in a warehouse.

See also the multiple eyewitness accounts of what brought down TWA-800, many involving a surface-to-air missile. The most likely explanation supported by evidence turned out to be faulty wiring igniting fuel vapor in the center tank. However, it took years of investigation and evidence gathering to finally put that initial speculation to rest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800

Take these testimonies with a bit of salt. The standard item in my repertoire on this is AA flight 587.

“ According to the National Transportation Safety Board, which announced this month that it had gathered 349 eyewitness accounts through interviews or written statements, 52 percent said they saw a fire while the plane was in the air. The largest number (22 percent) said the fire was in the fuselage, but a majority cited other locations, including the left engine, the right engine, the left wing, the right wing or an unspecified engine or wing. Nearly one of five witnesses said they saw the plane make a right turn; an equal number said it was a left turn. Nearly 60 percent said they saw something fall off the plane; of these, 13 percent said it was a wing. (In fact, it was the vertical portion of the tail.)”

https://web.archive.org/web/20130518210525/http://www.nytime...

And we rely on eyewitnesses to send people to jail for life.

Or kill them, depending on state.

It could be possible that turbines have stalled as a result of vigorous AOE changes and "flamed out"

A distortion-induced flameout is pretty unlikely - though something like a compressor stall is not out of the realm of possibility. These can result in brief discharges of flame out of the front of compressor against the direction of flight. But nothing sustained.

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