Hurtling Death From the Sky Aviation Crash Page
“Hurtling Death From the Sky” was my claim to brief online fame as the FIRST Aviation Crash website. Many aviation crash websites followed (lemmings) but none had my… “style”.
The site was hosted on my personal ISP webspace. At the time Network Solutions still had its monopoly on domain registrations with jacked-up prices, so I didn’t bother to register a domain, considering it was a hobby.
To be honest the endeavor began as an attempt at twisted levity (“Hurtling Death From the Sky”, get it? Some people didn’t btw…) and it rapidly turned into quite a popular site. I ended up putting a lot of time into finding, compiling, editing and adding content (there was no media content online at the time that I could LEECH like those many who followed). The site got a few reviews and received an “Eyesite of the Day” award from a Toronto magazine (“eye”).
I ultimately discontinued the site after less than a year because it was taking too much time and effort.
Note: some content was removed as it was LEECHED many years ago and I suspect it would be again. There is one crash site still online that appeared the year after mine was taken offline that copied a lot of my ideas and probably some of my content.
I initially hesitated to put this webpage back up, as I was sure at re-examination it would not be nearly as interesting as it had originally been.
The site went online sometime in late 1995 or early 1996 (February 1996 at the latest). Unfortunately I wasn’t backing up and archiving files religiously at that time and thereby don’t have original and early versions of the website…
At least one person LEECHED my webpages and served the site themselves after I took mine down, as this story from Wired News shows the link for “Hurtling Death From the Sky” at http://www.pcb.goldstar.co.kr/~jhjeon/yjhome/tsb/death/hdfs/home.htm which is a South Korean domain (.co.kr). Clearly this guy LEECHED all my stuff before I took down the site and didn’t waste any time putting it online after I took mine down.
As more examples of LEECHING note this image on a current website (Airdisaster.com): http://www.airdisaster.com/photos/ua826/photo.shtml
and the original scan that I made
http://www.ruralgeek.com/old_websites/hurtlingdeath/12_16_60.jpg
including the “Bettmann Arvchives” credit in the lower left that I added. Another example is the US Air photo I scanned from an NTSB report that first appeared online on my site, and is also in the Airdisaster.com photo section: http://www.airdisaster.com/photos/us1016/photo.shtml.
For a while I noticed old archives of the website appearing now and again when I did searches, and the WaybackMachine site had found some archived pages a while back, but they’ve since disappeared.
Here is a Google search that shows that although Hurtling Death is gone, it’s not completely forgotten. But slowly and surely all traces of it are disappearing…
The Original EZ Targets Website
For several years I played an online World War 2 massive multiplayer game called Warbirds. In that game you could form virtual “squadrons”, and these are the first websites for the EZ Targets squadron, formed by Mury back in the day.
Eventually Mury took over the website on his own server.
Oh, where have all those sad, bored men gone to…?
