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RUSH: All right, now, I wasn’t gonna get into this until later, but we got the phone call from the former pilot of the Boeing 777, Luke, who called us about a half hour ago. We had a great conversation with him about all of the just convoluted theories that are out there. And he said, “Yeah, you’re probably right. Occam’s razor: ‘The simplest explanation is what is going to end up being the explanation.'” My point is that it’s gotten so absurd… Well, let’s just play the audio, ’cause they talked about this on Fox this morning.

Martha MacCallum previewed it, and then Bill Hemmer had Howie Kurtz on to talk about this, and here’s what they played to set up that segment

RUSH ARCHIVE: It’s getting absurd now, is the point. All the conspiracy theories: “You know, that thing has been hijacked.” “You take the seats out of that thing and you can turn it into a giant nuclear bomb.” … This has just created this primordial soup atmosphere for conspiracy theories to just go through the roof, and it’s now so far gone that the simple explanation is what’s gonna end up being the truth here, but nobody’s gonna accept it because they’re so far gone now with potential theories that it’s gonna be difficult. People are not gonna believe the truth once it’s known.

RUSH: And I really think that’s gonna be the case, ’cause — and this is just one example — if I saw this once over the weekend, I saw this 10 times. “Well, yeah. You take that plane up to 45,000 feet and the passengers die. It depressurizes the cabin and they all die!” I said, “No, it doesn’t. The plane can fly at 45,000 feet. What the hell?” These were supposed pilots saying this! The flight crew would have to depressurize the cabin.

There’s another thing about this. I saw some poor pilot trying to explain this today in his lingo, and the info person, the anchor he was talking to didn’t understand his lingo. And he was talking about the air pressure inside your average airliner flying at altitude (35,000 or 37,000 feet), and he said, “You set the altitude inside at about 8,000 feet between Vail and Aspen,” and this anchor had no idea what this guy was talking about.

“What do you mean, you set the altitude?” The amount of air pressure in a pressurized cabin is what it is if you’re standing outside in Vail or Aspen, at about 8,000 feet. They do not pressurize for sea level. That would be cost prohibitive and there’d be other problems with it. And this is why some people do tend to fall asleep on airplanes, because there is less oxygen.

A really good pressurization system can pressurize at 5,000 feet. If you’re on an airplane… Well, EIB One pressurizes at 5,000 feet. It changes the air 12 times a minute, which is why you can smoke a cigar on there and nobody knows. Well, they know, but they really have to think about it. There’s no smoke, and it’s not bothering ’em. You couldn’t do that on a commercial airliner for a whole host of reasons.

But they don’t pressurize to 5,000 feet. What the guy was talking about was that they pressurize it at 8,000. But that’s not how he said it. He said it in pilot lingo. I forget the terminology he used, but this poor anchor had no clue what he was talking about. And then when he threw in, “Oh, yeah. It’s about same thing as Aspen, halfway between Aspen and Vail,” that just totally threw the anchor.

So, if you’re pressurized — and you have to be. Otherwise, you get to 12,000 feet anywhere, and that’s where you start to get wobbly and losing consciousness, and 15,000 feet is it. That’s why people that climb Mount Everest have to wear gas. They have to wear air tanks. There’s no air to breathe up there at 15,000 feet, and some people are going to start losing consciousness.

That’s why you have to pressurize. If you’re gonna fly at 37,000 feet, you’ve got to pressurize. Now, my only point was this airplane — and I asked him — is certified for 43,000 feet. That means they can safely go to 43,000 with pressurization at 8,000 feet, and it’s not gonna fall apart. It’s not gonna implode, not gonna explode. Different aircraft are rated for different safe altitudes. Like EIB One can do 51,000 feet. It’s a G550.

A G450 can do 45. Now, a G450 can actually get to 51,000, but it’s not allowed by the FAA to do it. It’s not legal, so you gotta stay within regs. There’s a different altitude for every qualification or category of airplane. Most of them are the same. A heavy airliner can’t get any higher than 37,000 feet normally because of full load, passengers. It’s heavy. It takes a lot of power to get up there, and you can’t do it ’til you burn off some fuel.

But they routinely… A commercial airliner is not gonna go higher than 37 anyway, and that’s because of the way the corridors in the sky are drawn. One of the great things about corporate is, you go 51,000 feet, and there’s nobody up there. So you can get vectors straight to where you’re going, rather than these waypoints you’re hearing about, which are checkpoints in the sky.

You hit that one and you get another one. It may require a little turn left or a little turn right, and that’s when you hear a guy, a pilot talking about getting “a good squawk.” A good squawk means he’s been given a beeline to where he’s going, or a squawk is also a signal output that helps identify the airplane. It can mean a couple things. But there’s no way… My only point is there’s no way that the 777 is gonna kill people flying at 45,000 feet.

It can do it easily.

Now, it may not be easy to get up there. The thing about that that fascinates me is, how in the world did it get up there that fast? That is the puzzling thing to me. That’s what interests me about it. But the passengers aren’t gonna die — unless the pilots turn off the pressurization. If you depressurize the cabin, then you’ve got a 45,000-foot altitude inside the airplane. There’s not enough oxygen, and people go to sleep.

They eventually will die, but they will die in their sleep. There’s no evidence that that happened, no evidence that the flight crew turned off the pressurization. But just getting to 45,000 feet’s not gonna kill anybody, not in that airplane. But that’s a classic example of the kind of just erroneous stuff that I have been hearing all weekend. So I was glad that Captain Luke called. So they played that part of me on Fox, that bit where I said, “It’s gonna end up being something simple.

“But by the time we get there, nobody’s gonna believe it ’cause they’ve heard all this outlandish stuff. They’d much rather believe an intricate, convoluted conspiracy theory based on the belief there’s some all-powerful wizard making this happen, rather than just the simple laws of nature. So they went and brought Howie Kurtz on, who is their media expert to talk about whether or not I knew what I was talking about. So Bill Hemmer starts off with Kurtz this way…


HEMMER: “A primordial soup,” says Limbaugh. But you can understand the dilemma, somewhat, can you not?

KURTZ: I totally see the dilemma. Everybody on the planet is interested in this saga. The story gets ratings, which is why CNN’s doing it 26 hours a day. And you bring on a parade of commentators and experts and analysts. And inevitably they say, “Well, I think it’s this; I think it’s that,” and you try to reign it in. But you got a lot of airtime to fill. And I think the coverage has seriously veered out of control.

RUSH: There you go. That’s my total, entire point. Hemmer’s curiosity was piqued, so he kept going with Kurtz.

HEMMER: Already today, CNN had one of these what we call banners, what you saw on the bottom of your screen. “Plane May Have Disappeared in a New Bermuda Triangle.”

KURTZ: You know what? The media’s credibility has disappeared into the New Bermuda Triangle.

RUSH: Right. And then they started talk about the supernatural. That was Don Lemon, one of their anchors, saying, “Oh, we need to look at the supernatural.” Now, I also said this on yesterday’s program.

RUSH ARCHIVE: I forget who said it, and I’m not even gonna get the saying right, but it might have been Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writing as Sherlock Holmes who said something like, once you have ruled out everything and the most improbable, the simplest explanation for any mystery is probably the case. The problem with trying to figure what happened with this airliner is that it’s impossible to conceive of the simplest explanation because now we’re at 10 days. Ten days that people have been watching television. Ten days of nameless, faceless experts all over every network, none of ’em know anything, all advancing theories.

RUSH: Well, CNN had to swat this down, and they chose to do it with our old buddy Jacob Tapper. Last night on CNN’s The Lead, he spoke with a retired commercial pilot, CNN aviation analyst Jim Tilmon.


TAPPER: Still no closer to finding the missing jet. And my next guest, a former pilot, says the simplest explanation is actually the least likely.

RUSH: See? See? They had to find what I said, without mentioning my name, “the simplest explanation is actually the least likely.” And here’s what the retired pilot said.

TILMON: I’m not of the feeling that these guys would shy away from difficult, because whatever happened here, number one, I believe that this whole thing was a plan thought through from the beginning to the end. I don’t know the end result yet, I don’t know what the endgame was, but I think there is one. This also was a situation that required great skill and experience to pull off. If these guys did have a good plan, what was their end game? Once they got to a certain point, were they going to just say, “Oh, well, we’re here, can’t think of anything else to do. ItÂ’s been good on TV, let’s just go. Let’s go fly into the ocean.” I don’t think so.

RUSH: Man, a good plan. There had to be a plan, and it’s a good plan. These guys did have a good plan, what was the endgame, and it wasn’t to crash in the ocean. So he thinks it’s landed somewhere. ‘Cause they had a good plan. Oh, well, he’s the expert, not I, folks. I’m just a guy on radio.

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