ok now ive heard everything

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Boomerang
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ok now ive heard everything

Post by Boomerang »

OK I'm all for paying tribute to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger mission STS-51L but this guy went way too far read the story from space.com below.

Plane Hijacked in Germany in Effort to Draw Attention to Challenger Astronaut Judith Resnik
By David McHugh
Associated Press Writer
posted: 03:24 pm ET
05 January 2003





FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- A man stole a small plane at gunpoint Sunday and threatened to crash it into the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, prompting evacuations and sowing fear in the German financial capital. He landed safely after about two hours and was arrested, police said.

The man told a television station during the drama that he meant to call attention to Judith Resnik, a U.S. astronaut killed in the 1986 post-launch explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.


Military jets scrambled after the stolen two-seat motorized glider began circling slowly above the skyscrapers of Frankfurt's banking district. Authorities ordered the evacuation of thousands of people from the main railway station, two opera houses and several skyscrapers _ the latter mostly empty on a Sunday afternoon at the end of the Christmas season.

Police would only identify the man as a 31-year-old German from Darmstadt, a city some 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Frankfurt. But television and radio stations named him as Franz-Stephan Strambach, a student.

``I want to make my great idol Judith Resnik famous with this,'' he said in a call from the plane to news channel n-tv. ``She deserves more attention, she was the first Jewish astronaut, and maybe that's why she isn't really considered.''

In radio contact with air traffic controllers, the man threatened to crash into the ECB headquarters unless he was allowed the TV interview as well as a call to Baltimore in the United States. He later said he wanted to commit suicide by plunging the plane into the Main River.

Police sent up a helicopter to try to force the plane away from the city, while two Phantom jets scrambled by the German air force also roared back and forth across the sky.

ECB spokeswoman Regina Schueller said about 10 staff were evacuated from their offices. The bank's president Wim Duisenberg was not in the building.

Yet the man told n-tv he didn't want to harm anyone, and at 5:11 p.m. local time (16:11 GMT), he put the plane down at Frankfurt's international airport, where flights were halted until he was back on the ground.

The plane was stolen Sunday afternoon from an airfield at Babenhausen, just to the southeast of Frankfurt. The man threatened the pilot of the plane with a gun, then took the controls and took off. Police said it was still unclear if the gun was real and loaded at the time.

A spokesman for the Babenhausen flying club said the plane was a single-engine Austrian-made Super Dimona motorglider and belonged to the club. With the engine switched off, the plane can be used as a glider.

The spokesman, who asked not to be named, said the man was not a member and had asked about taking a short flight with a motorglider before stealing the plane.

Resnik was among the seven astronauts killed when the shuttle Challenger exploded seconds after take off on Jan. 28, 1986 from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Strambach's name appears as the webmaster of an Internet site devoted to Resnik, with links documenting her career, death and efforts to remember her, including the position in the night sky of an asteroid carrying her name.

Calls to a listing under his name in Darmstadt went unanswered.

Resnik's brother Charles is listed as a radiologist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore and has helped run an organization that commemorates the Challenger crew.

Frankfurt police did not identify who the pilot of the stolen plane wanted to speak to in Baltimore.

``We can't exclude that this person had contact with the culprit,'' Frankfurt police president Harald Weiss-Bollandt told a news conference. ``We're checking that.''
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Post by Benji »

MS2Kris wrote:Some news reports are linking this to a crash last year about the same time in Florida by a 15-old.
The kid who crashed in Tampa was an Osama sympathizer. He wanted to crash into Central Command at MacDill AFB, but if you've seen ariel views of it, you'd see that everything is camoflagued (pardon my spelling). Not that a little Cessna would even dent Central Command, as it's underground. He ended up crashing into the largest marble building in the world, Tampa's Bank of America building. The local NBC affiliate bumped SNL back half an hour so that they could have more live coverage of this incedent, which wasn't hard, considering they could see it all from the newsroom window. They were interviewing people on they street and they were really frantic, comparing the situation to Sept. 11. I mean, c'mon, people! I drove by the building shortly afterward. It was simply boarded up. All that for a kid in a C150. What can you expect from a kid from St. Pete.

Anyway, about the hijacker, I'm sure Judy Resnik would be thrilled with being honored in this way. In general, Jews are against uneccessary violence and needless death. You'd think someone would think about this before doing something so stupid.
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Post by monkeynautt »

The funnuy thing is, on my local news they didn't even say anything about Judy Resnik. They just showed the man flying but didn't say anything else. The paper did mention Judy Resnik though.
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Post by Boomerang »

I had heard speculation on a connection between the two but i dont think one was ever really established. And i doubt Resnik or anyone else would want to be remembered like that.
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