By Aileen Torres-Bennett and Horace Helps
Reuters, September 5, 2014

KINGSTON (Reuters) – A small U.S. private plane with an unresponsive pilot crashed off the east coast of Jamaica on Friday after veering far off its course toward southwest Florida and triggering a U.S. security alert that prompted a fighter jet escort.

A New York county official said that Larry Glazer, a real-estate executive from Rochester in New York, and his wife, Jane Glazer, were aboard the plane. Both were killed, the official said.

It was not yet known if anyone else was on the plane.
Search and rescue teams, including a military plane and a helicopter, were despatched to the crash site about 14 miles (22 km) north of the tourist town of Port Antonio, Jamaica’s Civil Aviation Authority said.

The United States Coast Guard also joined the search with an HC-130 Hercules airplane and a helicopter, as well as a Coast Guard Cutter en route.

“At this time we have not located the aircraft or debris,” a U.S. Coast Guard spokesman said late on Friday afternoon.

The pilot stopped responding to radio calls about an hour after take-off from Greater Rochester International Airport in New York and was headed to Naples Municipal Airport in Florida, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said.

Search and rescue teams, including a military plane and a helicopter, were despatched to the crash site about 14 miles (22 km) north of the tourist town of Port Antonio, Jamaica’s Civil Aviation Authority said. (AP/Yahoo News)

The single-engine, seven-seater plane, a Socata TBM700, flew for several hours at an altitude of 25,000 feet (7,620 meters) southbound down the Florida east coast and south over Cuba, the FAA said.

It was trailed by two F-15 fighter jets, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) said, before the jets halted their escort when the plane entered Cuban airspace.

NORAD suggested on its Twitter page that the aircraft’s pilot may have suffered “possible hypoxia,” a rare condition caused by a loss of cabin pressure that may have left everyone on board unconscious.

In 1999, a Learjet carrying golf pro Payne Stewart lost cabin pressure during a flight from Orlando to Dallas. The aircraft eventually ran out of fuel and crashed in South Dakota.

CNN reported that the F-15 pilots who were tracking the aircraft could see the pilot slumped over before the plane’s windows frosted over. There appeared to be two pilots in the plane, CNN reported, but the FAA said it had not confirmed the number of people on board.

U.S. aviation authorities alerted Cuba to the plane’s approach and Cuban officials said it was not considered a violation of its air space.

The plane was owned by a company called New 51LG LLC, according to FlightAware.com and other online flight databases. That company appears to be registered at the same address as Buckingham Properties in Rochester, New York, according to registration documents posted on the Internet.

Calls to the company were not immediately answered.

Larry Glazer co-founded Buckingham Properties in 1970 and was the company’s CEO and managing partner. An online profile of Glazer said his hobbies included flying his plane.

Several local officials, including at least two state senators, released statements describing the Glazers as eminent members of the community in Rochester, a city in Monroe County near Lake Ontario in western New York.

Maggie Brooks, Monroe County’s executive, said Larry Glazer had left his mark on the Rochester skyline through his firm Buckingham Properties. Jane Glazer ran a mail-order homeware company called QCI Direct, Brooks said.

“They were personal friends of mine as well as amazing community leaders, philanthropists in so many ways, so this truly is a devastating loss on so many different levels for Rochester,” Brooks said at a news conference on Friday.

(Reporting By David Adams in Miami, Letitia Stein in Tampa, Jonathan Allen in New York and Daniel Trotta in Havana; Editing by Frances Kerry and Sandra Maler)

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Solving Human Problems through Transforming Human Attitudes

Of the many problems we face today, some are natural calamities and must be accepted and faced with equanimity. Others, however, are of our own making, created by misunderstanding, and can be corrected. One such type arises from the conflict of ideologies, political or religious, when people fight each other for petty ends, losing sight of the basic humanity that binds us all together as a single human family. We must remember that the different religions, ideologies, and political systems of the world are meant for human beings to achieve happiness. We must not lose sight of this fundamental goal and at no time should we place means above ends; the supremacy of humanity over matter and ideology must always be maintained. ~Dalai Lama

By Megan Gannon, News Editor
Space, September 4, 2014

A huge tendril of super-hot plasma that had been creeping across the face of the sun erupted Tuesday (Sept. 2) in a striking solar storm that may send a wave of charged particles in Earth’s direction.

Video of the solar eruption captured by NASA’s sun-watching Solar Dynamics Observatory shows a cloud of solar plasma being hurled from the sun’s surface during the rippling blast.

Debris from the solar explosion could be traveling in the direction of Earth, according to Spaceweather.com, which tracks stargazing and space weather events. Further observations should confirm whether the eruption was actually an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection, or CME.

A bright solar flare leaps from the left side of the sun in this new photo. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory obtained the image on Aug. 24, 2014.

CMEs occur when the sun’s magnetic field lines become so warped that they snap like rubber bands then reconnect at other points. These breaks can leave gaps where the sun’s plasma spews into space. CMEs can occasionally spark geomagnetic storms when they collide with Earth. These disturbances can interfere with electronics, cause radio blackouts and produce stunning auroras.

In the days before the eruption, the filament of dark plasma looked like a long shadow on the sun that stretched some 372,823 miles (600,000 kilometers) — that’s more than three times the diameter of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Amateur astrophotographers from around the world had been sending Spaceweather.com amazing amazing images of the filament over the past few days.

The blast occurred a day after a sunspot on the farside of the sun produced a “sizeable and fairly fast” CME according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. The CME was moving at approximately 4.5 million mph (2,000 km/s), and the source of the eruption was expected to rotate to the Earth-facing side of the sun in the next few days.

“It’s difficult to say what this region will hold as it rotates into view, but some potential for continued activity is surely there,” NOAA officials wrote.

Wrap a rainbow of joy in your heart,
Let the sun paint a smile on your face,
Remove all clouds of doubt & fear
And receive God’s gift of life.
~latestsms

Always ask yourself, what is the most loving thing I can do for this particular person in this particular moment? Love isn’t really one size fits all; what might be a loving act toward one person could be harmful to another person, in that it doesn’t help them get closer to becoming a truly happy human being. Unconditional love is a new decision you need to make in every situation, not a hard and fast rule you can apply to everyone all the time.

~wikiHow

Friendship is not a game to play. It is not a word to say. It doesn’t start on March
and ends on May. It is tomorrow, yesterday, today and everyday. ~lovelysms

Not too near and not too far
Out of the stress of the crowd
Music screams as elephants scream
When they lift their trunks and scream aloud
For joy of the night when masters are
Asleep and adream.  ~Lawrence, D. H. 1919

Peter makes a detour in his evening walk to the river to discover the piano.

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