I was just noticing that bright blinking light on the belly of the 72-600 and wondering why it looks like a flash photograph. It could just be a clever, hypnotic exploitation of an airplane convention, but I thought something looked a little "off" about it.
Well, I started looking at video of the 72-600 and planes like it, to see what their lights down there between the landing gear look like. I noticed two lights that the one in the "TAIPEI crash disaster OMG" video doesn't seem to have in the spot the lights appear on normal planes.
In videos of the 72-600, the "blink" is either a brief little pinkish white of minuscule size
or a large bright red flash that cameras can't handle without blurring or streaking compared to the non-lit parts of the plane.
So I put the pictures from YouTube videos of taxiing and flying ATRs into GIMP and compared the light levels. I could not figure out which of the two the white "flash" is supposed to resemble. It is no more red than the belly of the plane, indicating the general reds in the whole video is a bit up — interesting enough as it is, though I won't speculate why that is or how normal it is — but also that the light in the TAIPEI shot posted by Maat is plain white. You couldn't have much more of a grayscale consistency between the whole monochromatic blobby color of the plane and the light that flashes beneath it. There is no big red flasher or little pink blinker, just a medium white flasher — and nowhere else on the plane where other lights typically appear. I have no idea the significance of this; it really could be a white herring (har!) but to me it is subtly consistent with Simon's studies of odd coloring in alleged events that were likely simulated. Compositing notoriously causes minor issues of all kinds — from odd compressions, color bleedings or color loss — and it could be normal that nothing lights up in the environment when the single blink occurs, but I think it's funny. You'd think on an overcast day like the one shown, any slight color of the light (if it was anything but perfect monochrome white that matches the plane body, as if pasted in from a different color scheme) would show up quite well — be it a titanium-ish or blue-ish or the pink and red that normally appear below 72-600s.
Meh. Could be nothin'. Just spitballing. Moving on ...
- 72-600_light.jpg (300.58 KiB) Viewed 13506 times
Colors above: At the top of the image, I have measured the pinks and magentas from a normal image of the blinking belly light. At the bottom, the four colors in descending order are the pure white of the suspicious light (100% RGB), then the edge of the light, then the plane body near the light, then the plane body in shadow where the light couldn't reach. Note that the plane body has an ever-so-slightly
higher red percentage than the flash (!), which indicates the light isn't even neutral as much as it has a
lack of red compared to colors around it. I wonder how other videos of the crash compare.
Why is the fake plane blinking a single white flash that seems to appear out of nothing, while the usual videos of this plane show red and pink blinkers in that spot?