Asiana Airlines video shows emergency door open in flight; 12 hurt

At least 12 people suffered injuries Friday after officials said a passenger opened an Asiana Airlines commercial plane door during a flight in South Korea.

The incident took place on an Airbus A321 jet in East Asia as the plane, carrying 194 people was heading to the city of Daegu from the southern island of Jeju, Asiana Airlines and government officials confirmed.

A man sitting in the emergency seat row opened the door when the aircraft was about 700 feet from the ground and nearly two minutes from landing in the city about 150 miles south of Seoul, the South Korean Transport Ministry said, according to the Associated Press.

Passengers on board reported they attempted to stop the man, who was able to partially open the door, officials reported.

Video shot by what appears to be someone sitting three rows behind the emergency exit aisle, shows the plane in the air, with an emergency exit door open to the person's left.

Passengers sitting in seats next to the open door appear to remain buckled while articles of their clothing blow behind their heads in the footage.

The plane landed safely.

When the plane landed, airport police arrested the man on charges including violating the aviation security law, a ministry statement said.

Officials have not released the man's identity yet. According to ministry transportation laws, he faces up to 10 years in prison in connection to the incident.

According to local emergency officials, crews transported 12 passengers to hospitals for treatment in connection to "breathing problems and other minor symptoms."

'Severe ear pain'

Footage shot on board shows some of the passengers’ hair being blown about by air blasting into the cabin through the open door.

Passengers screamed and cried, Yonhap news agency reported, and some said they suffered "severe ear pain" after the door opened.

Photos shot on the ground show at least one person being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Another shot taken inside the plane displays police arresting the person suspected of opening the plane door.

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Contributing: Associated Press

Natalie Neysa Alund covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.

Teen on Alaska Airlines flight left topless after shirt 'sucked off'

A 15-year-old boy, who was on board Alaska Airlines' Flight 1282, had his shirt "sucked off" when the Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet lost a door-sized section of its fuselage six minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, one of the flight's passengers' Kelly Bartlett said on Instagram.

"Friday night I was on the plane from Portland in which a wall panel blew out fifteen minutes into our flight," wrote Bartlett. "We had just passed 10,000 feet when there was a loud boom and the plane filled with wind and noise and the oxygen masks dropped. Three rows behind me was a hole in the side of the plane."

Bartlett said that there was "total chaos for a couple of minutes" as everyone scrambled to secure themselves and those sitting in the row of the missing wall "found new seats on the other side of the plane".

"There was one open seat next to me, and a 15-year-old kid jumped over me, sat down, and grabbed the mask," wrote the artist. "He had no shirt on because it had been sucked off when the panel blew."

The teenager, Jack, had been sitting in the middle seat of that row, while his mother was in the aisle seat, according to Bartlett. The window seat was unoccupied.

What travelers should know:Boeing 737 Max 9s grounded after Alaska Airlines jet loses window

Here's how it happened:A Boeing 737 MAX 9 lost a panel midair, terrifying passengers

Redness and scratches

Bartlett said that she was unable to talk to Jack because of the noise so she used hand gestures and the notes app on her phone to communicate with him and check if was doing okay. Though Jack said that he was fine, Bartlett said that he had redness and scratches on his skin, which could have been caused by windburn.

About 15 minutes later the plane made an emergency landing in Portland.

"After only the first few minutes of chaos, the plane was under control and we knew we were descending back to PDX," wrote Bartlett. "I never felt like we were going to crash. It was windy and loud in the plane, but everyone was calm, and we landed safely within 15 minutes."

Bartlett said that Jack was mostly concerned about his mom and the two reunited when the flight landed in Portland.

Meanwhile, paramedics arrived at the scene as soon as the flight landed and went on board to treat those who sustained injuries, mostly minor, according to Bartlett.

"Then we all got off the plane just like normal, no need for emergency slides…just walked out the jetway as usual," said Bartlett, adding that Jack wanted to take a selfie “to commemorate the experience”!

Speaking to the Associated Press, Bartlett praised the crew and staff for responding "well to the situation" and keeping everything under control.

“The flight attendants really responded well to the situation," Bartlett told AP. "They got everyone safe and then they got themselves safe. And then there was nothing to do but wait, right? We were just on our way down and it was just a normal descent. It felt normal.”

National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy, in a press conference Sunday night, also praised the flight crew, calling their actions "really incredible".

“The actions of the flight crew were really incredible,” the NTSB chair, Jennifer Homendy, said at a Sunday night news conference. She described the scene inside the cabin during those first seconds as “chaos, very loud between the air and everything going on around them and it was very violent”.

Intact iPhone found:Debris surface from Alaska Airlines' forced landing

Bartlett was later rebooked on another flight to Corona, California and safely made it there the same night.

"It was crazy and scary, and I am so thankful it was not a worse situation," said Bartlett. "Everyone was safe and relatively uninjured."

Alaska Airlines Flight 1282

177 passengers and crew, including Bartlett, were on board the Alaska Airlines' flight, which was at an altitude of 16,300 feet when the fuselage unit gave way, but fortunately no one was seriously injured. The flight was en route to Ontario, California, roughly 40 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, from Portland.

Passengers on board the flight described a loud, chaotic and violent scene of wind howling through the plane, after the wall panel broke off. The cockpit door was flung open and the wind tore the headset from the copilot. The pilot's headset was pulled halfway off. Crew and passengers donned oxygen masks.

Investigation ongoing

Aviation authorities, including the NTSB are investigating the incident.

A key piece of evidence, the torn-off section known as a “door plug,” was recovered Sunday near Portland by a schoolteacher. Investigators will examine the 63-pound, 48-by-26-inch plug to determine why it separated from the plane.

Two cellphones, believed to be from the plane, were also found nearby.

Saman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at sshafiq@gannett.com and follow her on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter @saman_shafiq7.

How an Alaska Airlines flight lost a door-size section midair

Aviation authorities are investigating why an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet lost a door-sized section of its fuselage six minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, a failure that critically depressurized the aircraft and forced an emergency landing Friday.

None of the 177 passengers and crew was seriously injured aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, which was at an altitude of 16,300 feet when the fuselage unit gave way. The plane landed safely in Portland.

The National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies are investigating.

A key piece of evidence, the torn-off section known as a “door plug,” was recovered Sunday near Portland by a schoolteacher. Investigators will examine the 63-pound, 48-by-26-inch plug to determine why it separated from the plane.

Two cellphones, believed to be from the plane, were found nearby.

Authorities also are examining an auto pressurization warning light, which lit up on three previous flights − on Dec. 7, Jan. 3 and Jan. 4 − to see whether it played a part in the incident. Alaska Airlines restricted the jet from flying to Hawaii so it could land quickly if the warning light reappeared.

What happened aboard the aircraft?

Flight 1282 left Portland International Airport for Ontario, California, at about 5:07 p.m. local time Friday. Occupants heard a bang about six minutes into the flight when the fuselage section ripped away.

Passengers later described a loud, chaotic and violent scene of wind howling through the plane. The cockpit door was flung open and the wind tore the headset from the copilot. The pilot's headset was pulled halfway off. Crew and passengers donned oxygen masks.

The FAA grounded more than 170 Boeing 737 MAX 9 jets for inspection after the incident. Alaska Airlines and United Airlines are the main operators of the MAX 9 in the U.S.

What is an aircraft door plug?

Boeing uses door plugs to cover unused emergency exits on most of its 737 MAX 9 jets. The door plug is visible from outside the plane but looks like a regular partition and window from the inside.

Boeing constructs its 737s with emergency exits behind the aircraft’s wings. That’s in accordance with federal law, which says planes must be built to allow evacuation of all passengers within 90 seconds even if half of its exits are blocked.

Airlines can choose either door plugs or emergency exits when they configure seating arrangements on the aircraft. Boeing's 737 MAX 9 can be fitted with up to 220 seats.

Federal law requires MAX jets with more than 200 seats to have the extra emergency exits in use. Planes with fewer seats can use door plugs. The option has been an industry standard for years.

Flight 1282 has 189 seats and carried 171 passengers and six crew.

Four bolts hold the door plugs in place. The plugs have hinges at the bottom and can be unbolted and swung open about 15 degrees from the outside.

______

CONTRIBUTING Emily DeLetter, Zach Wichter and Suhail Bhat, USA TODAY

SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; National Transportation Safety Board; Associated Press

Southwest passenger dies in mid-air crisis after being wedged in ...

Shrapnel from a blown jet engine crashed through a window of a Southwest Airlines flight and caused such a perilous drop in air pressure that a passenger suffered fatal injuries after nearly being sucked outside.

Passengers recall a harrowing scene where desperate crew members and others tried to plug the broken window, while also trying to save the mortally wounded woman, identified as a bank executive and mother of two.

The battered jet eventually made an emergency landing in Philadelphia and all other passengers made it off without serious injuries. But not before everyone on board used oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling and many said their prayers and braced for impact.

“I just remember holding my husband’s hand, and we just prayed and prayed and prayed,” said passenger Amanda Bourman, of New York. “And the thoughts that were going through my head of course were about my daughters, just wanting to see them again and give them a big hug so they wouldn’t grow up without parents.”

Dallas-bound Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 out of New York had 144 passengers and a crew of five onboard, Southwest said in a statement. The plane was met on the tarmac by a phalanx of emergency vehicles that quickly sprayed the area with safety foam and aided the injured.

Jennifer Riordan of Albuquerque, N.M., was identified late Tuesday as the victim who died.

Riordan, a vice president of community relations for Wells Fargo bank and graduate of the University of New Mexico, was the first passenger death on a U.S. airline since 2009— and the first ever in Southwest Airlines' history.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez called Riordan “an incredible woman who put her family and community first” and said her loss would be felt across the state.

“The hearts of all New Mexicans are with the Riordan family,” Martinez, a Republican, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Passengers on board described chaos as the decompression led to Riordan being partially sucked out of the plane. They rushed to try and pull her back inside but her injuries were too grave.

Seven others were injured in the incident. Tracking data from FlightAware.com showed Flight 1380 was heading west over Pennsylvania at about 32,200 feet and traveling 500 mph when it abruptly turned toward Philadelphia.

National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt told reporters at a late-night briefing that he is "very concerned" about metal fatigue in several of Flight 1380's jet engines, particularly in the fan blades. He said a piece of one of the jet engines was found about 70 miles north of the Philadelphia airport.

Bourman was asleep on the plane when she heard a sudden noise and the oxygen masks dropped.

“Everybody was crying and upset,” she said. "You had a few passengers that were very strong, and they kept yelling to people, you know, ‘It’s OK! We’re going to do this!’”

Another passenger, Marty Martinez, posted a brief Facebook Live video showing him donning his oxygen mask. "Something is wrong with our plane!," he wrote. "It appears we are going down! Emergency landing!! Southwest flight from NYC to Dallas!!"

Southwest said the Boeing 737-700 left New York's LaGuardia Airport shortly after 10:30 a.m. ET, bound for Dallas Love Field. The airport said the plane had landed "safely" and that passengers were being brought into the terminal.

Thiel said a small fire was found in one engine and fuel was leaking. At least one window and the fuselage were also damaged, officials said. AP also reported that the twin-engine 737 apparently blew an engine at 30,000 feet and got hit by shrapnel that smashed a window.

Passengers commended one of the pilots for her cool-headed handling of the emergency. She walked through the aisle and talked with passengers to make sure they were OK after the plane touched down.

“She has nerves of steel. That lady, I applaud her,” said Alfred Tumlinson, of Corpus Christi, Texas. “I’m going to send her a Christmas card, I’m going to tell you that, with a gift certificate for getting me on the ground. She was awesome.”

Gary Kelly, Southwest's chief executive officer, commended the flight crew for safely landing the plane but said the company and the NTSB were in the early stages of investigating exactly what led to the incident.

"This is a sad day and on behalf of the entire Southwest family, I want to extend my deepest sympathies for the family and loved ones of our deceased customer," Kelly said. "Truly, this is a tragic loss."

In addition to being the first fatality aboard a U.S. passenger airline since 2009, Kelly said it was Southwest’s first fatality ever.

“Let me assure you the safety of our customers and crew is our uncompromising priority," he said.

Southwest flies Boeing 737 aircraft exclusively, with a fleet of about 700 planes.

“It is a very, very reliable engine,” Kelly said. “The airplane in my opinion is proven. It’s very reliable. It has the greatest success of any aircraft type over a long, long period of time. It doesn’t create any doubt in my mind, at least at this point.”

The plane Tuesday was a 737-700, but the entire fleet has the type of GE engine that failed, Kelly said.

“We are in close contact with the manufacturers,” said Kelly, who said the company is cooperating with investigators from FAA, DOT and NTSB. “At this point, it’s very premature to say what changes we might need to make, if any.”

Kelly has tried to contact the victim’s family, but hadn’t reached them by 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

“I reached out to the family and at this point have not made contact,” Kelly said.

The plane was delivered to Southwest in July 2000 and has made about 40,000 flights. The engine last had a major overhaul about 10,000 flights ago, and the plane’s most recent inspection was Sunday, although Kelly couldn’t say what was inspected.

“There is no information that there were any issues with the airplane or the engines,” Kelly said.

Flights continued to arrive and depart, but the incident led to delays of other flights, the airport said in its statement. The FAA had issued "ground stop" for planes on the ground at other airports waiting to depart Philadelphia. The ground stop was lifted shortly before 2 p.m.

Contributing: Christal Hayes and Bart Jansen of USA TODAY; Associated Press

South Texas couple was on Southwest flight 1380 in emergency ...

One George West couple had the fright of a lifetime Tuesday.

Diana McBride Self, 56, and Alfred Tumlinson, 55, were two of the 144 passengers aboard the Dallas-bound Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 out of New York that made an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

The couple is originally from the Corpus Christi area. McBride Self attended Mathis High School and Tumlinson attended Ray High School.

Mcbride Self told the Caller-Times that she and Tumlinson were attending a week-long Texas Farm Bureau reward trip in New York when they were on their way back home.

"We were about 30 minutes into our flight when we heard a loud boom," she said. "We looked up and a few rows in front of us we saw a commotion. ... Suddenly, we saw a woman moving quickly towards the plane window."

McBride Self said she didn't understand what was going on at first and thought the woman was trying to open the side door of the plane.

"Suddenly the oxygen masks dropped and I saw one of the passengers step up to pull the woman back away from the plane window," she said. "A nurse that was on the plane started CPR. This was all happening while the plane descended rapidly."

Shrapnel from a blown jet engine had crashed through a window of the Southwest Airlines flight and caused a perilous drop in air pressure. A passenger suffered fatal injuries after nearly being sucked outside the plane. Seven others were injured.

More:Mother of two dies in mid-air crisis after being wedged in Southwest plane window

Jennifer Riordan of Albuquerque, N.M., was identified late Tuesday as the victim who died.

More:'She is the bedrock of our family': Wells Fargo exec died on Southwest flight

McBride Self said people were panicking and screaming during the flight.

"My husband Alfred Tumlinson and I were sitting towards the back when the oxygen masks came down," she said. "He checked on me first to see if I was okay, but I was fine and never panicked, and then started trying to calm everyone down and get their masks on."

Brady Tumlinson, Alfred Tumlinson's son, told the Caller-Times that he was in shock when his dad texted him out of the blue saying his plane was crashing.

"I was at work when he texted me 'I love you. Our plane is about to crash,' " he said. "I didn't know what he was talking about and I reached out to him asking what he meant. He texted back and said that his plane was crashing and to tell my grandparents."

Brady Tumlinson said he prayed immediately hoping his dad and his wife would make it safely. When they landed, Alfred Tumlinson told him they were okay.

"It's a crazy feeling you know, you never want to experience that for your family. You never think it will happen to you or anyone you care about, but it can happen," Brady Tumlinson said.

Alfred Tumlinson told his son that it was a traumatic experience, but that he does not want to live his life in fear.

"They were nervous to get back on another plane," Brady Tumlinson said. "Right now they are taking it easy and on their way home."

Alfred Tumlinson told USA TODAY that he was grateful for the cool-headed pilot, Tammie Jo Schults, who walked through the aisle and talked with passengers to make sure they were okay after the plane touched down.

"She has nerves of steel. That lady, I applaud her," he said. "The lady, the crew, everything, everybody was immaculate. ... They were so professional in what they did to get us on the ground.

"I’m going to send (Schults) a Christmas card, I’m going to tell you that, with a gift certificate for getting me on the ground. She was awesome.”

More:Southwest emergency landing pilot Tammie Jo Shults is a pioneer with 'nerves of steel'

McBride Self also thanked the Southwest pilot, calling her a true American Hero.

Grace Kelly, Southwest's chief executive officer, said this was the first fatality aboard a U.S. passenger airline since 2009 and the first in Southwest's history.

More on the Southwest Airlines flight:

Southwest Airlines engine failure investigation focuses on broken metal fan blade

Southwest flight diverted after engine damaged

Hero cowboy, firefighter together pulled mom who was sucked out of Southwest flight back inside

Southwest Airlines flight started 'routine' and ended in tragedy: What we know

'There were a lot of heroes,' says passenger on fatal Southwest flight

USA TODAY's top 10 Travel stories of 2019: The stories you cared ...

Before we officially put 2019 in the rearview mirror, we're taking one last look back at the travel stories that had readers clicking – and talking – this year.

Surprisingly, the ongoing saga of the Boeing 737 Max groundings and the tourist deaths in the Dominican Republic that were initially linked to tainted alcohol (but were later attributed to natural causes) didn't make the top 10. Nor did the furor over rising resort fees or the trend toward banning Uber and Lyft from picking up passengers at the curb.

Read on to see which stories did.

10. Viking Sky evacuates after issuing mayday off Norwegian coast

On a Saturday in late March, the oceanliner Viking Sky airlifted more than half of its 900 passengers after experiencing engine troubles and a harrowing encounter with rough waters and high winds off Norway's western coast. The next day, the ship limped into port with the aid of a towboat.

Passenger Carolyn Savikas of Pennsylvania described the terror to Norway's VG newspaper, saying she heard a "terrible crash" and the ship rocked, causing water to rush in.

"We were in the restaurant when a really huge wave came and shattered a door and flooded the entire restaurant," she said. "All I saw were bones, arms, water and tables. It was like the Titanic – just like the pictures you have seen from the Titanic."

9. Southwest passenger bombarded by 'inappropriate photos' from stranger on flight

Kat Pitman was settling into her aisle seat on a Southwest Airlines flight from Louisville to Chicago on a Friday morning in June, texting her husband, when her iPhone buzzed.

She looked down to see an AirDrop request. Someone whose name she didn't recognize was sending her a pornographic image. The sender's name? A NSFW take on Bilbo Baggins from "The Hobbit.''

"It was just very explicit. It just shocked me,'' the 40-year-old frequent flyer said in an interview with USA TODAY. She said she was "amazed" when flight attendants picked up the intercom and told "Mr. Baggins'' to immediately stop AirDropping.

And thanks to Pitman and Mr. Baggins, iPhone users realized they should change their Airdrop settings so that they can't receive files from "everyone." (If you haven't yet, here's how.)

8. The haunted house you have to sign a 40-page waiver to enter

In October, a haunted house that took blindfolded "contestants" to locations in Tennessee and Alabama went viral for its hair-raising requirements for entry. Participants had to clear a background check, pass a doctor's physical and mental exams, and sign a 40-page waiver. If they got through all that – and survived the haunted house itself – they got $20,000.

Plenty of speculation and outrage arose online over how safe the extreme haunted experience really is. Creator Russ McKamey told USA TODAY, "It's all entertainment. Halloween is nothing more than a big play. (The Manor) is just putting on a big show. That's all it is, just a big production."

7. United Airlines flight attendant walks on aircraft's wing in mid-air

Sabrina Swenson, a United flight attendant based in Frankfurt, Germany, decided to go big for her 50th birthday last winter: She strapped herself to the wing of a Boeing Stearman plane in Sequim, Washington, and went for a ride over the Olympic Peninsula.

"My time wing walking in beautiful Sequim will live on in my memory until my last day," she wrote in a blog post on United's website. "You simply don't forget one of the best days of your life!"

6. Hurricane Dorian: How popular Bahamas destinations fared

Hurricane Dorian was expected to focus its wrath on southern Florida – and Alabama if you believed President Trump's Sharpie-edited map – but the storm stalled over the Bahamas over the Labor Day holiday, pounding the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama, killing more than 60 people and leaving 70,000 homeless.

With sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, the Category-5 Dorian was the strongest and slowest hurricane to hit the Bahamas since records began in 1851. It was a devastating blow for a country where tourism accounts for 60% of the gross domestic product (the most of any Caribbean nation).

More than three months later, the country is still trying to return to normal. Grand Bahamas International Airport reopened to flights in late November while Marsh Harbour Airport on Great Abaco didn't reopen until Mid-December.

5. Delta ranked best airline in annual list; Frontier worst

Not a week goes by that we don't see some kind of ranking of U.S. and international airlines, sorting them according to factors like on-time performance statistics, family-friendliness or onboard water quality.

In April, Delta topped the 29th annual Airline Quality Rating, which took into account metrics like mishandled baggage, consumer complaints, on-time performance and involuntary denied boardings over the course of 2018.

The study, a joint research project of the W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott, Arizona, campus, found that overall, the airline industry improved in every area but on-time performance, the most heavily weighted element. It also found that 2018 saw the lowest rate of bumped passengers, the lowest rate of mishandled baggage and the lowest rate of customer complaints for the industry since the study began in 1991.

Frontier's last-place finish was attributed to its poor on-time record (nearly one out every four flights was delayed), lackluster cabin features and high rate of customer complaints.

4. United Airlines passenger stung by scorpion on flight to Atlanta

United might want to beef up their pest patrol efforts after passengers on a June flight from Venice to Newark discovered their plane was infested with ants. A scorpion bit a woman on a December flight from San Francisco to Atlanta, giving us ideas for a sequel to the 2006 Samuel L. Jackson movie "Snakes on a Plane."

3. Shark attack: California student killed by trio of sharks in the Bahamas

Hurricane Dorian wasn't the only sad story in the Bahamas in 2019. In June, California resident and Loyola Marymount University student Jordan Lindsey, 21, was attacked by three sharks while snorkeling with her family near Rose Island.

Officials said her arms, legs and buttocks were bitten and her right arm was severed. She was taken to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

“There was no medical attention provided to Jordan,” the Lindsey family said later in a statement. “They had no first aid kit – no basic supplies for any type of injury. It felt like a lifetime as they waited for a boat to arrive.”

The family called on tour companies to change their safety protocols and tourists to be more aware to “ensure a tragedy like this does not happen again.”

2. Why economy passengers should stop reclining their seats

If you're a regular reader of travel columnist Christopher Elliott, you know he has some strongly held convictions about how airlines treat passengers – especially those sitting in economy – and how those passengers treat each other.

In a November column, he argued that with airlines giving passengers as little as 28 inches of legroom, "Reclining your airline seat is unacceptable because we're officially out of space. It's rude – and it's wrong."

Plus, as he noted, "If you recline your airplane seat, you'll probably end up in someone's lap. Literally."

1. Woman gives birth on American Airlines jetway

An American Airlines flight landed with an extra passenger the day before Thanksgiving when Nereida Araujo gave birth to a healthy baby girl on the jetway of Flight 868, after landing in Charlotte, North Carolina, from Tampa, Florida.

"Baby Sky decided to enter the world on a plane," Araujo wrote on Facebook. "Mommi (sic) handled it well thanks to everybody who assisted us with love & care."

For those wondering why she was flying at all, Charlotte TV station WSOC reported Araujo was 38 weeks pregnant and cleared to fly by the airline and her doctor.

Sky wasn't the only airplane baby of 2019: In February, an expectant mother gave birth to a baby boy thousands of feet in the air on a JetBlue flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The birth of the airline's "youngest customer to date" coincidentally happened on a plane named "Born To Be Blue."

Dishonorable mention: The guy who claimed he had a plane to himself

Filmmaker Vincent Peone went viral in August when he documented what it was like to have a Delta plane all to himself – a rarity in this age of overbooked flights. But it was too good to be true: It turned out the plane departed without him.

Three days later, he broke his silence, tweeting, "The story took off fast, but the plane did not."

He wrote, "My video is 100% true… and then I stopped filming. After the private jet broke down again with mechanical problems, I took a normal one the next morning. The footage I have tells a short, funny and positive story – because those are the kind of stories I like to tell. I make comedy!"

The media outlets who reported the story weren't amused when Peone went radio silent for several days after the initial story, refusing to answer questions after the truth got out.

Contributing: Dawn Gilbertson, David Oliver, Julia Thompson, Morgan Hines, Hannah Yasharoff

Even after 25 years, the scars of TWA Flight 800 are still painful ...

The mother opened her box of memories and the pain and darkness poured out again.

She pulled out a card. Then a letter. Then a photo of the daughter she lost 25 years ago when a majestic and seemingly indestructible commercial jetliner blew up over the Atlantic Ocean only minutes after lifting off from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, killing all 230 passengers and crew.

Such is the complicated, enduring legacy of TWA Flight 800.

To some it is still a story of a terrorist conspiracy that persists despite well-documented facts showing the plane was actually brought down by a tragic mechanical failure. To others, it is a somber, bureaucratic turning point in how America investigates air crashes.

But for victims’ relatives like Carol Ziemkiewicz, formerly of Rutherford, who lost her daughter Jill Ann in the TWA 800 fireball, it is still a troubling story of lives cut short – an open wound of the heart that never seems to heal.

On those days, when she peruses the boxes with photographs and letters and poems about her daughter, Ziemkiewicz is reminded once again of what might have been.

“I lost my heart, my soul,” said Ziemkiewicz. “My family will never be the same.”

From ancient times, history has been pockmarked with sudden, unexpected tragedy that rips apart the lives of ordinary people. But our modern world, with television and social media, have brought those intimate moments of tragedy into our living rooms and to the cellular phones we carry in our pockets. What once might have seemed distant and limited to people far away has now become far more personal.

So it is with TWA Flight 800.

Column continues below gallery.

America watched on the night of July 17, 1996 as orange flames from the downed airliner streaked the Atlantic’s choppy surface, just a few miles off the coast of Fire Island.

We followed the video footage of fishermen and recreational boaters who rushed to the scene from docks in the Moriches Inlet in the hope that some passengers and crew might survive.

Later, we monitored the trail of conspiracy theories. Was this an act of terrorism, perhaps the kind of suitcase bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988? Was it an errant missile fired from a U.S. Navy ship? Was it a meteor? After all, so many boaters thought they saw streaks of light in the summer sky.

We also witnessed genuine goodness too.

Listen: WCBS interviews Mike Kelly about the 25th anniversary of TWA Flight 800

As families of the lost passengers gathered at a hotel, we were introduced to the grace and kindness of a Franciscan priest — the Rev. Mychal Judge — who comforted the grieving. Five years later, Judge would perish in the 9/11 terrorist attack as he ministered to firefighters and police at New York City’s World Trade Center’s twin towers. His grave in Totowa is now a shrine for those who want him proclaimed a Roman Catholic saint.

It turned out that TWA 800 fell because sparks from a defective wire ignited vapors in a fuel tank, which then exploded. But subsequent investigations by the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board changed America.

Not only was TWA 800 one of the worst air disasters in U.S. history, it also raised questions about how America responds to conspiracies, how our government monitors the maintenance of aging commercial jetliners and how we treat relatives of victims.

One major change that resulted from the plane’s downing was that airlines now are required by federal law to set up a toll-free hotline for victims’ relatives to obtain information after a crash and to assign groups such as the Red Cross to care for those relatives.

Such basic policy changes, however, mean little to the families of those who lost mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandchildren and friends. As with many tragedies, the rest of the world eventually moved on. But for those most closely affected, the wounds are still fresh.

Families forever changed

“Some people say time heals all wounds. I don’t think that’s true,” said John Seaman of Albany, New York, who lost a niece aboard TWA Flight 800 and went on to lead a coalition of victims’ relatives who campaigned for airline safety. “Time doesn’t heal the wounds. Time just provides anesthesia.”

On an otherwise recent sunny summer day, Carol Ziemkiewicz sat in the quiet of a kitchen of her spacious and gleaming townhouse in Point Pleasant Beach where she moved after retiring from teaching third grade for several decades at Rutherford’s Pierrepont School.

A picture of her daughter Jill sat on a nearby table — a friendly smile with wide, inviting eyes. Ziemkiewicz opened a photo album, pausing at a snapshot of her and Jill sitting on the lap of a Macy’s Santa Claus when mother and daughter spent a day in Manhattan. Over a door leading to a patio, a plaque said: "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away."

Ziemkiewicz reached for a stack of letters from Jill’s friends, then another photo album and more pictures. She fell silent, her eyes reading the now-familiar sentiments of a poem, with this haunting stanza: “Like a comet blazing ‘cross the evening sky, gone too soon.”

“Losing Jill was like everything inside me was gone,” Ziemkiewicz said. “I just could not comprehend the shock. Literally, it was the shock.”

Jill Ziemkiewicz had just turned 23 in 1996 when she suspended her dream to be a landscape designer and signed up to become a TWA flight attendant after noticing an ad in a newspaper. An accomplished high school swimmer, her close friends called her "Jilly Fish."

After finishing her TWA training in the spring of 1996, Jill worked a few domestic flights. But TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996 was to be her coming-out party of sorts – her first international flight.

“The rookie,” then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman said in a eulogy.

A quarter-century later, Whitman said she is still troubled by the loss of life on TWA Flight 800.

“It’s such an overwhelming tragedy,” Whitman said in a recent interview.

When Jill Ziemkiewicz stepped into the fuselage of the Boeing 747 at JFK on that July night 25 years ago, she wore the TWA uniform – a blue, knee-length skirt, a white blouse, a blue scarf knotted around her neck like a cowgirl.

TWA Flight 800 did not take off until around 8:30 p.m. Just after 5 p.m., Jill phoned her mother in Rutherford.

Carol Ziemkiewicz still has the Bell Atlantic telephone bill that lists the call. She also remembers her daughter’s last words.

"Mom I'm psyched. I’m going to the garden,” Jill excitedly told her mother — a reference to the Gardens at Versailles palace just outside of Paris that was once home to French royalty and is now a museum. As a student of landscape architecture at Rutgers University, Jill longed to walk amid lush flowers and shrubs and clipped lawns at Versailles.

She never made it.

“She wasn’t going to Versailles,” Carol Ziemkiewicz now reasons. “She was going heaven.”

A jetliner explodes

Thirteen minutes after TWA flight 800 took off on an otherwise clear night, the plane was rocked by an explosion in a fuel tank near the wings.

The jetliner cracked and broke into several sections, then fell into the Atlantic. Luggage and wiring and food and seats and fuel and pillows and blankets and peeled-off sections of the fuselage were scattered for miles on the ocean surface and across its sandy floor.

Also scattered in the surf or deep below were the bodies of the 230 victims. It took months, but the remains of every victim were eventually found, aviation investigators said.

Column continues below video.

“Sometimes it seems like it’s yesterday. Sometimes it seems like an eternity,” said Jill’s older brother, Matthew Ziemkiewicz, now the Bergen County deputy coordinator for emergency management.

Matthew was already mourning the loss of his father a year earlier to a heart attack. Losing Jill was a shock that never wore off.

“Nothing’s ever the same,” he said. “You move on. You get better. But there’s a big hole in the family.”

For Jill’s sister, Carin, who was only two years older, the loss was also devastating.

“We grew up together. We did everything together,” Carin said. “We were born to be best friends.”

Scars that don't heal

Some 180 miles from Rutherford, in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, Stephanie Bedison bears similar emotional scars as the Ziemkiewicz family.

Bedison was a coach and teacher to several of the 16 students from the town’s high school French Club who perished on TWA Flight 800. They were traveling to Paris with five adult chaperones.

For Montoursville, a 4-square-mile speck of a town in central Pennsylvania with just 4,600 residents, the loss of 21 residents was a shock to the system.

“It was hard to accept,” said Bedison, now retired from her job as a special education teacher and track and cross-country coach at Montoursville Area High School. “It was surreal.”

Bedison’s son, then a high school senior, considered joining the French Club on its trip to Paris. But he chose another trip – to Honduras – as part of a science project.

Television news trucks swarmed the tiny community after the crash. So did conspiracy theorists and ordinary people who just wanted to offer some measure of comfort.

Bedison said many Montoursville residents retreated into their own emotional privacy while also trying to make time to attend the funerals.

Even today as she looks back, Bedison feels pained as she recalls the students who were lost and the town’s collective grief.

“Each one of these kids was unique,” she said. “You’re talking about kids who affected almost every aspect of the school, from drama to academics to athletics. Almost everyone knew one of the students.”

In memory of the victims, Montoursville erected a statue of an angel with hands extended to a monument with the names of the town's victims.

“Why is there an angel statue in the middle of the town?” Bedison said. “This is our history. This is a history lesson. People should know that.”

Recovery mission

In Moriches, New York, Matthew Cashman also feels that need to remember the history of TWA Flight 800.

Cashman, an electrician, jumped on his father’s fishing boat – “The Rogue” – on the night that TWA Flight 800 blew apart and crashed into the Atlantic. Several friends from the town joined them. Their goal, they figured, was to rescue survivors. Only no one was alive.

“We were staring at this massive debris field that was still on fire,” Cashman recalled.

Then, he spotted a body. Then another. Then, two more.

In all, Cashman and his father, Thomas, who was well known on Long Island as a shark fisherman, recovered four bodies that night, all of them women.

“They were people. They were gone,” Cashman said, as he recalled how the group carefully lifted each victim from the Atlantic, placing them side by side on the boat’s deck and covering them with blankets. “There was no conversation on the boat.”

Cashman drew comfort by helping to build a monument to the TWA 800 victims atop a sand dune overlooking the beach at Long Island’s Smith Point State Park. But he is still troubled by what he saw on the night the jetliner crashed.

“It’s still raw,” he said “Just talking about it now makes me feel like it happened yesterday.”

In her Point Pleasant Beach home, Carol Ziemkiewicz says she draws comfort from a garden in Lyndhurst that was built in Jill’s memory.

The garden, which is based on one of Jill’s designs as a budding landscape architect, features wind chimes — a favorite of Jill’s — and a fountain designed to replicate the sunflower, which was one of Jill's favorites. But memorial gardens, while comforting, can’t erase the scars of losing a daughter.

“A lot of people have moved on,” Carol said. “I haven’t.”

Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in New Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com

Twitter: @mikekellycolumn

Intelligence: Russia has taken to trying to jam NATO plane's radar ...

ABOARD A NATO SURVEILLANCE PLANE ABOVE THE POLISH-UKRAINIAN BORDER CNN —

Russia has been using Belarus as a springboard for many of its air operations in Ukraine, according to intelligence collected by NATO surveillance planes flying over the Polish-Ukrainian border and radar seen by CNN.

CNN accompanied NATO’s Flying Squadron 2 on one such surveillance mission on Thursday. Within two hours of taking off at 8 a.m. CET, the radar on board the NATO AWACS plane – short for Airborne Warning and Control System – picked up about a dozen Russian-made planes idling in Belarus just north of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, NATO tactical director Denis Guillaume told CNN.

Hours later, at least nine Russian-made planes were spotted entering Ukrainian airspace from Belarus, appearing to head toward Kyiv, the radar showed.

The “vast majority” of the Russian-made fighter jets that NATO forces have seen entering Ukrainian airspace since Russia’s invasion began have originated in Belarus, the NATO mission’s technical director told CNN on board Thursday’s flight. On one particularly “active” day last week, NATO forces saw about 20 Russian jets heading to Kyiv from Belarus, he said. The military aircraft taking off from Belarus and entering Ukrainian airspace have been in support of Russian military operations in Ukraine, the NATO airmen told CNN.

Among the major questions looming over the war has been whether Belarusian forces have directly entered the conflict to support Russia. But the NATO troops said they could not answer that – Belarus and Russia use the same Soviet-era MiG-29s, they said, so it is difficult to say in real time who is actually operating them. Ukrainian pilots also use the MiG-29s, they noted, so it is similarly unclear how contested Ukraine’s airspace has become.

Still, some signs are obvious, they say. For example, the jets flying into Ukraine from Russian-allied Belarus are clearly not Ukrainian.

The AWACS plane on which CNN flew Thursday is one of the few military assets owned by NATO itself, rather than donated by a member country, and the fleet of 14 AWACS planes together conduct nearly two dozen missions per week, spying more than 400 kilometers east to ensure that no unfriendly aircraft are headed toward NATO’s airspace.

The missions are routine but have become particularly “intense” since Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the co-pilots told CNN. NATO has stepped up its defense of the eastern flank members over the last several weeks, and Thursday’s surveillance flight was particularly long, requiring a midair refueling.

As the AWACS flew its mission on Thursday, a Russian spy plane circled over Belarus doing similar surveillance in the opposite direction, the airmen pointed out. That has become typical, as has spotting Russian fighter jets – mostly MiG-29s – performing defensive exercises nearby.

The Russians have also taken to trying to jam the NATO plane’s radar, an annoying but inevitable occurrence given how visible the giant spy plane is.

“It’s not a secret we are here, and we don’t want it to be a secret,” said the NATO technical director.

One question the airmen decidedly refused to answer was whether the intelligence they gather, which is ostensibly for use only by members of the NATO alliance, is being provided to Kyiv.

“I cannot answer that question,” Guillaume said firmly.

“The only thing I can tell you right now is that we, as NATO allies, are sharing the data with NATO countries,” the NATO technical director echoed.

What the NATO member countries do with that intelligence, however, is at their discretion, the NATO technical director hinted.

The caution reflects NATO’s fraught position as the war drags on: As an organization, it continues to underline that it is not an active player in the conflict and that it is providing no direct assistance to Ukraine so as not to risk provoking further Russian aggression that some fear could even include an attack on NATO territory.

But its member states, including the US and UK, have openly touted their intelligence and military contributions to Ukraine, which have been clearly aimed at blunting the Russian military’s advances.

The NATO surveillance plane is capable of more than just intelligence-gathering, though, and can call in tactical operations if needed. For Thursday’s mission, for example, the plane was controlling fighter aircraft on the Polish-Belarusian border “in case there is a threat to NATO territory,” Guillaume said.

Any action, though, “would have to be in line with the rules of engagement,” he added. “We are still in a peacetime posture.”

Fact check: 20 false and misleading claims Trump made in his ...

Washington CNN —

Former President Donald Trump began his 2024 presidential campaign just as he ended his presidency in 2021: with a whole lot of inaccuracy.

Like many of Trump’s speeches as president, his announcement speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday was filled with false claims about a variety of topics – from his record in office to his Democratic opponents to the economy, the environment and foreign policy.

Here is a fact check of 20 false or misleading things he said. This is not a comprehensive list.

Afghanistan withdrawal

Trump claimed Tuesday evening that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan upon its military withdrawal in 2021.

“Perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, where we lost lives, left Americans behind and surrendered $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump’s figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion — a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

There is not any basis for Trump’s claim that $85 billion worth of equipment was left behind. As other fact-checkers have previously explained, that was a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. Only part of this funding was for equipment.

Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Trump claimed his administration “filled up” the Strategic Petroleum Reserve but it has now been “virtually drained” by the Biden administration.

Facts First: Both parts of Trump’s claim are false. He didn’t fill up the reserve, and the reserve is not “virtually drained.”

Though Trump has repeatedly boasted of supposedly having filled up the reserve, it actually contained fewer barrels of crude when he left office in early 2021 than when he took office in 2017. That’s not all because of him – the law requires some mandatory sales from the reserve for budget reasons, and Democrats in Congress blocked the funding needed to execute Trump’s 2020 directive to buy tens of millions more barrels and fill the reserve to its maximum capacity – but nonetheless, it didn’t get filled.

As CNN’s Matt Egan and Phil Mattingly reported in mid-October, the US reserve remains the largest in the world even though it was at a 38-year low after President Joe Biden released a major chunk of it to help keep oil prices down in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and, coincidentally or not, prior to the midterm elections). The reserve had more than 396 million barrels of crude oil as of the week ending November 4.

Tariffs on China

Trump also boasted about his tariffs on China, claiming that “no president had ever sought or received $1 for our country from China until I came along.”

Facts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.”

Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing the cost of the tariffs.

Sea level rise

Trump claimed that unnamed people aren’t talking about the threat of nuclear weapons because they are obsessed with environmental issues, which he said, “they say may affect us in 300 years.” He added, “They say the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years. But don’t worry about nuclear weapons that can take out entire countries with one shot.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false – even if you ignore the absurd contention that people aren’t paying attention to nuclear threats because they’re focused on the environment. Sea levels are expected to rise much faster than Trump said. The US government’s National Ocean Service said on its website that “sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10 - 12 inches (0.25 - 0.30 meters) in the next 30 years (2020 - 2050), which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years (1920 - 2020).”

And though Trump didn’t use the words “climate change” in this claim, he strongly suggested that people say climate change may only affect us in 300 years. That is grossly inaccurate; it is affecting the US today. The Department of Defense said in a 2021 report: “Increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks and creating new security challenges for U.S. interests.”

Drug use and punishment in China

Trump claimed that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had told him that China has no “drug problem” at all because of its harsh treatment of drug traffickers. Trump then repeated the claim himself, saying, “if you get caught dealing drugs in China you have an immediate and quick trial, and by the end of the day, you are executed. That’s a terrible thing, but they have no drug problem.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is not true, just as it was when he made similar claims as president. Joe Amon, director of global health at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, said that “yes, China has a drug problem” and that “China, like the US, has a large number of people who use (a wide range of) drugs.” The Chinese government has itself reported that “there were 1.49 million registered drug users nationwide” as of the end of 2021; in the past, officials in China have acknowledged that the number of registered drug users are a significant undercount of actual drug use there.

And while Trump solely credits harsh punishments for what he claims is China’s success in handling drugs, the Chinese government also touts its rehabilitation, education and anti-poverty efforts.

Presidential records

Complaining about how he is under criminal investigation for taking presidential documents to his Florida home and resort, Trump repeated a debunked claim about former President Barack Obama’s handling of presidential documents.

“Obama took a lot of things with him,” Trump said.

Facts First: This is false – as the National Archives and Records Administration pointed out in August when Trump previously made this claim. Though Trump claimed that Obama had taken millions of records to Chicago, NARA explained in a public statement that it had itself taken these records to a NARA-managed facility in the Chicago area – which is near where Obama’s presidential library will be located. It said that, as per federal law, “former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.”

NARA has also debunked Trump’s recent claims about various other presidents having supposedly taken documents to their own home states; in those cases, too, it was NARA that moved the documents, not the former presidents. It is standard for NARA to set up temporary facilities near where former presidents’ permanent libraries will eventually be located.

Gas prices

As he has on other occasions during Biden’s tenure, Trump used misleading figures when discussing the price of gas. He said: “We were $1.87 a gallon for gasoline, and now it’s sitting five, six, seven and even eight dollars, and it’s gonna go really bad.”

Facts First: This is so misleading that we’re classifying it as inaccurate. While the price of a gallon of regular gas did briefly fall to $1.87 (and lower) during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the national average for regular gas on Trump’s last day in office, January 20, 2021, was much higher than that – $2.393 per gallon, according to data provided to CNN by the American Automobile Association. And while there are some remote gas stations where prices are always much higher than the national average, the national average Tuesday is $3.759, per AAA data, not $5, $6, $7 or $8. California, the state with the highest prices as usual, has an average of $5.423.

Deportations under Obama

Trump claimed Tuesday evening that his administration, unlike Obama’s administration, had convinced countries like Guatemala and Honduras to take back their gang members that had come to America.

“The worst gangs are MS-13. And under the Barack Hussein Obama administration, they were unable to take them out. Because their countries where they came from wouldn’t take them,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.

Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back their citizens during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.

In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.

For the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. You can read a longer fact check, from 2019, here.

Missile landing in Poland

Trump claimed Tuesday that a missile that was “sent in probably by Russia” landed 50 miles into Poland. “People are going absolutely wild and crazy and they’re not happy,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.

Facts First: This claim is false. While Poland said a Russian-made missile did land in their territory Tuesday, killing two Polish citizens, the explosion happened about four miles west from the Ukrainian border.

Additionally, it remains unclear where the missile was fired from, and why it fell in Poland.

Finishing the border wall

Trump made a false claim about one of his signature policies, a wall at the border with Mexico.

“We built the wall, and now we will add to it. Now, we built the wall – we completed the wall – and then we said let’s do more, and we did a lot more. And we did a lot more. And as we were doing it, we had an election that came up. And when they came in, they had three more weeks to complete the additions to the wall, which would’ve been great, and they said no, no, we’re not going to do that,” he said.

Facts First: It’s not even close to true that Trump “completed” the border wall.

According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not completed. The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280, about 74 miles of barriers were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”

Democratic leaders and the National Guard

Trump claimed that Democratic governors and mayors refused to ask for “help” even during “a total breakdown of law and order,” and “don’t want to ever ask to do anything,” so “we sent in the National Guard in Minneapolis and in other places.”

Facts First: This is a false claim Trump liked to make during his presidency. It’s not true that Trump sent in the National Guard to Minneapolis and that Democratic leaders there refused to ask; it was actually Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard amid unrest in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Walz, who served in the Army National Guard for more than two decades, first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself.

When Trump made this false claim in 2020, Walz’s office told CNN that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.

Biden’s acuity

Mocking Biden’s mental acuity, Trump said, “There are a lot of bad things, like going to Idaho and saying ‘Welcome to the state of Florida, I really love it.’”

Facts First: This never happened. Biden, like Trump, has made occasional gaffes in referring to places, but this one is fiction. At a rally earlier this month, Trump claimed that Biden had gone to Iowa and wrongly claimed to be in Idaho; that false claim was published by a satirical website in 2020.

Illegal immigration

Lamenting illegal immigration, Trump said, “I believe it’s 10 million people coming in, not three or four million people. They’re pouring into our country.”

Facts First: False. “There is no empirical basis at all for the idea that 10 million undocumented people have entered under President Biden,” Emily Ryo, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California’s law school, who studies immigration, said in a Monday email when CNN asked her about Trump making this claim earlier in November. Julia Gelatt, an expert at the Migration Policy Institute think tank, concurred: “Based on the data available, it is not possible that 10 million unauthorized immigrants have come across the border to the U.S. under President Biden. In fact, the reality is a fraction of that.”

Mark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump (and head of the Border Patrol under Obama), told The Arizona Republic in an early-November article that the “worst case scenario” for the number of illegal border crossings under Biden through October “could be 6.2 million.” Trump’s estimate was not close even to that estimate.

And there are a bunch of important nuances here. Customs and Border Protection has recorded more than 4.3 million total nationwide border “encounters” under Biden, but that number includes people who presented themselves to the authorities to begin the process of seeking humanitarian protection. And while Trump used the word “people,” Ryo emphasized that the number of “encounters” is not the same as the number of separate individuals who have crossed the border. Because many people encountered at the border are rapidly expelled under the Title 42 policy – including more than half of those encountered in the 2021 fiscal year – lots of the same people quickly come back to the border and try again. In the 2021 fiscal year, the recidivism rate was 27%, according to official data.

Inflation in turkey prices

Trump claimed, “Good luck getting a turkey for Thanksgiving. Number one, you won’t get it and if you do, you’re gonna pay three to four times more than you paid last year.”

Facts First: This isn’t even close to true. Turkey prices have increased since last Thanksgiving season, but they haven’t come close to tripling or quadrupling. The weighted average advertised supermarket price of a whole frozen hen is 97 cents per pound as of the most recent US Department of Agriculture report – up about 10% from the same time last year. The price of a whole frozen tom was up by about 7%.

And though Trump made these comments while criticizing the Biden administration over inflation, it’s worth noting that the turkey market in particular has been significantly impacted by avian flu.

Trump and wars

Trump said that his critics claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign that there would be a war within weeks if Trump was elected – “and yet I’ve gone decades, decades without a war. The first president to do it for that long a period.”

Facts First: This is nonsense. Trump was president for four years, so he could not possibly have gone “decades, decades” without a war. Also, Trump presided over the US involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, though he obviously didn’t start any of these wars and withdrew some troops from all three countries. And he was commander-in-chief for dozens of US airstrikes, including drone strikes, in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, plus a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, that prompted Iranian retaliation against US service members.

Trump and ISIS

Trump gave himself credit for the liberation of ISIS’s “caliphate” in Syria, saying “the vicious ISIS caliphate, which no president was able to conquer, was decimated by me and our great warriors in less than three weeks.”

Facts First: This is a major exaggeration. The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019, not “less than three weeks” into his presidency in 2017; it’s not entirely clear what Trump meant by “decimated,” but the fight continued long after Trump’s first weeks in office. And Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past. There was major progress against the caliphate under Obama in 2015 and 2016 – and Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting.

IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing the size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

Terrorism under Trump

Trump claimed: “We had practically, just about, not that I can think of, no Islamic attacks, terrorist attacks, during the Trump administration.”

Facts First: Trump did qualify the claim by saying “practically, just about, not that I can think of,” but it’s not true that there were no terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic extremists during his presidency. Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a terror attack in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was an act of Islamic extremism carried out in support of ISIS. In fact, Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. And Trump’s Justice Department alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.

The military’s use of old bombers

Boasting of how he supposedly rebuilt the military, Trump said, “When I got there, we had jet fighters that were 48 years old. We had bombers that were 60 years old, we had bombers where their grandfathers flew them when they were new. And now the grandchild is flying the bomber – but not anymore.”

Facts First: It’s not true that Trump ended the use of 60-year-old bombers. The military continues to use B-52 bombers that old; they are now being outfitted with new Rolls-Royce engines to prolong their life even further. (And the B-52 isn’t the only decades-old plane still in use.)

Trump’s popularity along the border

After boasting of how he is viewed by Latinos, Trump claimed that “along the border in Texas, won every single community – I won – every single community.” He said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told him that he had “won every single area along the border, the longest since Reconstruction.”

Facts First: We don’t know what Abbott told Trump, but it’s not true that Trump won every single area along the border with Mexico. Trump lost border states in both of his previous races – California and New Mexico in both 2016 and 2020, Arizona in 2020 – and also lost numerous border communities in Texas and elsewhere both times, as you can see in these New York Times maps here and here.

Trump did make major gains with some Texas border counties between 2016 and 2020, becoming the first Republican in decades to win some of them, but his claim was about how he supposedly won them all. That’s inaccurate.

Inflation

Trump claimed about inflation: “As we speak, inflation is the highest in over 50 years.”

Facts First: This is not true; Trump exaggerated a statistic that would have worked in his favor even if he had recited it accurately. October’s year-over-year inflation rate of 7.7% is the highest since 1982, if you don’t count previous months this year when it was higher. So, ignoring those other Biden-era months, it is the highest in 40 years, not the highest in “over 50 years.”

We might let this go if Trump did not have a years-long pattern of exaggerating numbers to suit his purposes.

Daniel Dale Paul Leblanc
Daniel Dale
Paul Leblanc

Emirates flight from Dubai to Australia lands with large hole in side

The arrival Saturday of an Emirates flight in Australia offered a stunning revelation: a large hole was discovered in the side of the plane, which had just completed a 14-hour flight.

The incident, in which no crew members or passengers were reported injured, happened on a Airbus A380 from Dubai to Brisbane, Australia.

Passengers on the plane told The Courier Mail in Australia a loud bang was heard early on in the flight, but after conversation among crewmembers, the flight continued as usual.

English actress Lisa Kay said she was on the flight, saying on Twitter: "I recall a noise & the flight attendants looking concerned at each other."

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Shortly before landing in Brisbane, the pilots told air traffic control members they believed they blew a tire and requested emergency service be on stand-by, according to the aviation website Aviation Herald.

Emirates confirmed the incident in a statement to USA TODAY, calling it a "technical fault."

"One of the aircraft’s 22 tires ruptured during cruise, causing damage to a small portion of the aerodynamic fairing, which is an outer panel or the skin of the aircraft," the statement read.

Emirates said the fault had no impact on the fuselage, frame or structural integrity of the aircraft, which allowed it to safely land and allow passengers to exit the plane normally and on schedule.

"The fairing has been completely replaced, checked and cleared by engineers, Airbus and all relevant authorities. The safety of our passengers and crew has always been our top priority," Emirates added.

Follow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.

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