That is a very good analogy, RickJay. I believe my immediate thought when I first visited Tour d’Eiffel was approximately what you quoted.
I grew up in the DC area; to visit grandparents we always drove by the Pentagon. So I don’t have the same “Oh my Cecil!” reaction when I see that building. But I wouldn’t be surprised if many people do.
Please explain. Why would a fighter jet act differently than a passenger plane? Shorter wing length? How would a fighter fly differently once they were hit?
Pretty much. Fighter planes are relatively tiny. You’d have to have one swerving back and forth and back and forth to try to cover the area of the passenger plane.
F-15C: Wingspan 42 feet, 10 inches.
757: Wingspan 124 feet, 10 inches.
And basically, bigger plane means better tolerance for damage. Mass matters, after all. The light poles, relative to the fighter, would hit it harder. Think of it as smacking a light pole in a SUV versus a dump truck. SUV will take a hit or two, better than a sports car would, but the dump truck won’t notice a thing.
Yeah, gotta admit. The Pentagon is part of my background noise because it’s always been there. But the Eiffel Tower impressed me as HUGE when I first saw it. Not just the height, either. It was the sheer size of the beams used that really hammered me.
Not to mention, outside wall of Pentagon: 921 feet.
It could’ve been hit by a supertanker and the hole would look small.
I don’t know about that. Does the leading edge of a wing care if it’s backed by a 757 or an F-15? What matters is the material it’s made of.
Also, there’s the example of the Israeli F-15 that managed to land safely after losing its entire right wing in a mid-air collision.
I was in class at George Mason Law when the Pentagon was hit (about 1.5 miles away, as the crow flies). Several students coming in for the later morning classes saw the plane fly over as they drove to school… clipping light posts as it went.
My father was in the Pentagon. He has a very interesting first hand account if anyone is interested.
So in response to the OP, I know several eye witnesses.
Stink Fish Pot, on 9/11/01 I was an editor at the local daily newspaper (The Arlington Journal) and our reporters went out and found many eyewitness reports from people who saw the plane hit the Pentagon. There is a freeway right next to the building on the side it was hit, and many people were in morning rush-hour traffic. There was also a gas station opposite the crash site on the other side of the road, and people who were there saw the crash too.
I am not sure why you (or anyone) would think there were not many eyewitness accounts.
Intuitively, I was amazed that a 500MPH hit on an airplane wing by 6 light poles didn’t seem to faze the plane much at all. I guess we can conclude that what is substantial for a plane is fragile for a light pole.
I wonder if the hijackers considered light poles in their planned trajectory. Did they think such hits would have little effect, or did they not consider what would be in their path that low to the ground? I wonder how many light poles it would have taken to reduce the airspeed to stall values and produce a much different outcome.
Because of lies and distortions by ‘truthers’. Really an ironic name anymore.
No way of knowing. If they thought about it at all, they may have planned to miss them. Such things are REALLY hard to see from the air, even from fairly close, and at low speed.
I fly sailplanes and have made several off-airport landings. Finding the power poles/power lines is a BFD to me. I look at every building and figure out how it gets it’s power. I assume every road has a power line along one side, and get damned nervous if I can’t find it, and still worry that there is one on the other side too. From above, it is usually easier to see the shadows of the poles than the poles themselves.
If the poles were not along a road then I don’t imagine the hijackers were able to see them in time to avoid them.
I also know lots of pilots and have spent my life reading about aviation. Everything I know tells me that the “official version” of the 9/11 events is as near truth as the available evidence will allow. And most of what I have heard truthers claim about how airplanes behave is garbage.
Oh, yeah: Pure guess, but I’d put the speed of impact at the Pentagon at 500mph+ They were in a shallow dive, and airline pilots actually have to work to keep the speed down in that case.
I think that the Pentagon was a target of opportunity for them. They were tooling around looking for one of several targets to hit but not sure where anything was, probably following the river and saw it, then just turned in to hit it. I’m sure the light poles never crossed their minds. Not that they would have had much effect…by that point the plane was in terminal approach, moving too fast as with too much mass to have anything as flimsy as a light pole stop it. If you wanted to land or keep the plane flying, then hitting a light pole would definitely be A Bad Thing™, but if you just wanted to crash into something and cause damage or destruction then the pole would make no difference at all. Sheering off the wings wouldn’t stop the fuselage from continuing forward, and from the models I’ve seen the plane basically turned into what was essentially a liquid on impact anyway (which is why you don’t find a lot of large pieces of debris, though why the Truthers think there SHOULD be a lot when an aluminum air craft flying at high speed hits a concrete structure is beyond me).
One interesting thing to go along with some of the anecdotes listed in this thread is that I was living in the area at the time and working in Crystal City. I didn’t see the crash, but what I do remember is the huge smell of jet fuel in the area right after the crash. You could smell it from a long way away…it’s rather distinctive if you’ve ever been around jets.
-XT
And I doubt if light poles, telephone poles, silos or my kid’s cowlick are on aviation maps. 
And I understand they gunned it at the last minute; probably too late to have much effect except psychological.
A minor point of correction - Flight 77 came in from due West, while the Potomac comes in from the Northwest. There’s also the meme that Flight 77 wandered around aimlessly for a while before diving into the Pentagon, but that’s not what happened either. He was coming from the West straight for the DC area, and made one circle to lose altitude, straightening out along a path that’s WSW of the Pentagon. He never wandered around like he was looking for the White House or Capitol building. It seems to me that the Pentagon was his intended target but was surprised when he got almost there and had too much altitude, so he had to make one circle to lose the altitude before he flew the plane into it.
The Potomac is one of the most recognizable landmarks from the air and I’d say it’s a safe bet the the pilot was using it as a navigation reference. I didn’t mean to imply he was flying straight over it. As to the meme, I think it’s clear from the flight path that the pilot saw the Pentagon and maneuvered to it on more or less the spur of the moment, and wasn’t going for it straight. That isn’t to say it wasn’t one of his targets or even that it wasn’t his primary target, but it’s more difficult for people to navigate in the air in a large aircraft going hundreds of miles an hour than most people realize.
-XT
The leading edge would get right messed up, but the mass of the plane would power through, for the 757. The rest of the wing would be pretty okay. At slow speed, the F-15 might get jerked about. I don’t think it’d get torn off, but you might get a nasty skew into the ground.
One thing to notice is that the poles did not hit the same wing, and they were 5 poles BTW not 6.
My educated guess is that the poles did more damage to the plane than the one showed in the simulation, but even huge dings were irrelevant. The plane was not going to go up anyhow.
During the 1960s, a number of people began working on changing the designs of existing light poles to make them safer for cars to hit. This generally took the form of designing them to stand up in a wind, but simply giving way when struck by a solid object. (E.g., Standards for break away light poles in Texas.)
I have no direct information regarding the current status of light pole design, but I would guess that they have continued to make them rather light, relying on shape, rather than mass, to keep them upright. A Google search for “break-away light poles” turns up a lot of hits with more information.
Then consider a hollow pole, less than a foot in diameter, when struck by a metal “knife” blade that varied from over 25 feet deep at the fuselage to around five feet deep at the tip, a “knife” blade that was designed to hold up to 250,000 lbs. of weight in the air. It is similar to the issue of the fuselage disintegrating when confonted by a stationary concrete wall. Relative mass and speed makes a difference when evaluating the effects of a collision. (There are still cities using concrete or tree poles, but few of the lights on freeways use those materials.)
That doesn’t seem like a big issue to me.
What’s the approximate weight of a light pole? For the sake of discussion, let’s assume 1000 lbs.
What’s the approximate weight of a 757? Per WP, the max take-off weight of a 757-200 is 255,000 lbs. Allowing for fuel used, less than full load, and round numbers, let’s assume weight at impact was 200,000 lbs.
So we have a fast-moving object hitting something roughly 1/200’th of its weight/mass. Most of the inertia before the impact with the light pole is going to remain with the far more massive plane.
In the interest of sanity, could someone please make up a list of the previous threads this has been covered, so that the next time it happens we can respond with “Read these. If you have something new that has yet to be addressed, please come back. Thank you.”