Teej - I tried posting on the original thread twice this morning, but after I submitted the post, the thread remained unchanged on both occasions. It doesn't appear to be locked, so I just assumed it was some admin related jiggery-pokery preventing more posts being added.
Back to the plot, I'm still only pondering the issue. It's probably no coincidence that it was the coldest night of the year so far (at that point) on the night the turbine failed, so we're probably looking at ice/temperature related failures, because there wasn't a breath of wind that night. This also means the blades wouldn't have been turning much - if at all - so it's possible falling chunks of ice could've come into play somewhere. There had been some light rain during the day too, so there could conceivably have been some substantial ice formations on the turbines. The talk in the papers of a 'missing' blade is nonsense. Just because the alleged witnesses didn't see it, doesn't mean it wasn't there. It was there. Laid on the ground close by.
They claim to be certain that the blades struck something. It could have been blade-on-blade or ice hitting the blades, but it'll be interesting to see if they think the failure was caused by a contact, rather than a contact being a side effect of the failure.
I'm personally not interested in UFO claims and all that crap. But I do like to ponder some slightly more feasible theories.
As for being out on the shoreline at 3am as mentioned in my first post, as I said in PMs to other members when I first posted, we were awoken by the sound of a flotilla of tugs in the Humber estuary. We had no idea what the hell the noise from their engines was. After at first thinking it was out plumbing or heating, we went outside and noticed it coming from the direction of the sea. We hopped in the car and were completely underwhelmed when we realised it was just ship engines. I've never noticed the sound carry as well as it did that night. But that's when we saw the UAV. Quite unremarkable in many ways, but almost definitely a UAV. It was well lit in the moonlight and we watched it for probably 2 minutes until it went out of view. No lights, slow, not high and not much sound, but not a 'regular' plane.
Last edited by harrogate; 8th Jan 2009 at 14:24.