I have concluded by examining the Kobe Bryant crash data that the Sikorsky N72EX transporting Kobe Bryant and his guests took a violent tumble out of the sky inside a narrow 13 second window spanning about a half mile of descent. During that time, the aircraft plummeted at least 750' with increasing downward vertical acceleration typical of an object under mechanical failure approaching terminal velocity or 'free fall'. Given the described experience of the pilot, the pilot's knowledge of the terrain and the reputed 'bulletproof' (link now private and also here) reputation of this particular helicopter, my best guess is that plane was shot down with a shoulder armed missile (e.g. 'manpad') equipped with data link and/or infrared tracking, a proximity fuse and a large field fragmentation warhead. For some examples and information on how shoulder armed missiles are deployed and have been used against civilian aircraft see (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ,6, 7, 8).
I have little or no domain knowledge for my supposition. I understand that I am looking at ADS data. I understand that ADS data uses "pressure altitude" readings that can need correction for true altitude. Below are some data and graphs from data from Flight Radar 24 on the Kobe Bryant crash. Please make a comment if you see an inaccurate statement. The granular data looks like this in rdata.table: |
Monday, January 27, 2020
Kobe Bryant Crash Data and Some Conclusions
Friday, January 17, 2020
Some notes on using Greek Symbols in R for variables and inserting Unicode symbols as text
From SO https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59105619/insert-specific-unicode-symbols-inside-values-of-data-frame-variable/59763650#59763650
"If you are on Windows 10 recently updated with as of April 2018 Update: Use the Windows key + '.' (e.g. hold together Windows Key plus period) in your text editor. This brings up Microsoft Emoji keyboard. Select the Greek letters variable for your script. The R Console will not accept the Greek letters as variables directly but only the from the editor script. Some of the Greek letters don't translate to English (like "µ" or "ß".) You can paste and copy them from ls() output to access. You may be able to use some math symbols as well for variable names. I can't however, get this to work with source(). That must be a text encoding problem." Click to enlarge chart.
"If you are on Windows 10 recently updated with as of April 2018 Update: Use the Windows key + '.' (e.g. hold together Windows Key plus period) in your text editor. This brings up Microsoft Emoji keyboard. Select the Greek letters variable for your script. The R Console will not accept the Greek letters as variables directly but only the from the editor script. Some of the Greek letters don't translate to English (like "µ" or "ß".) You can paste and copy them from ls() output to access. You may be able to use some math symbols as well for variable names. I can't however, get this to work with source(). That must be a text encoding problem." Click to enlarge chart.
