Classic case this one. The FAA's official line was essentially ". Weather phenomenon". And then proceeded to say almost nothing else for months. Very on-brand for them.
What gets me is that there were multiple credentialed witnesses - United Airlines staff, ground crew, gate personnel. These aren't blokes who'd been on the sauce. They filed internal reports, some spoke to the Chicago Tribune, and then suddenly everyone went very quiet indeed.
The ". Silencing". Question is interesting though. Was it active suppression or just the usual combination of:
NDAs from their employers, Fear of professional ridicule, FAA simply not investigating (which they admitted)
Personally I think the latter two do most of the heavy lifting. I've spoken to witnesses in my own investigations around the Midlands who clam up not because anyone threatened them, but because they don't fancy being the office laughingstock. Human nature does half the cover-up work for free.
That said, the FAA did initially deny any reports existed, then reversed that when the Tribune obtained records via FOIA. So there's at minimum some deliberate obfuscation going on at institutional level.
The disc punching a hole through the overcast cloud layer is the detail that's always stuck with me. Hard to dismiss that from multiple independent witnesses.
Anyone here dug into the FOIA documents themselves? Curious whether there's anything in the raw transcripts that didn't make the mainstream reporting.
