Yes, I know, not the greatest movie ever, and a fantasy on many levels, but I always wondered if Kong could really have made that leap. The towers were 140 feet apart. The full-size Kong model was 40 feet tall. Scaling up a gorilla to that size, is a leap of that distance feasible?
How high up was he when he jumped? Roof to roof?
If it’s from the side of one to the side of the other, no way. I’d guess he could jump from the roof of one and catch the side of the other somewhere on the way down. Air resistance wouldn’t be a gigantic factor since mass scales with length cubed and drag with length squared. He’d probably get enough lateral velocity to make it.
Scaling up to that size, not only could King Kong not jump at all, he couldn’t stand and would instantly collapse and die from having to support his own weight.
The towers were not aligned side-to-side, but corner-to-corner.
Oh, sure, be that way - spoiling a nice little fantasy setting with ugly facts. 
Yes, he leaped from roof to roof at their closest points.
Right. I was asking if in the movie he jumped from the lateral area of one tower to the lateral area of the other. Commonly referred to as the sides.
He also backed up and had a running start, IIRC.
Another way to consider it and keep it within the realm of physical possibility is to scale down WTC #1 and #2 instead. Could a normal-sized gorilla jump from the top of one scale model to the other? Invert the scale shown in the movie.
Leaving aside the problem Wendell Wagner points out, and looking at this simply in terms of proportionality – Human Long Jump records tend to be around 26 feet, or roughly 4.5 to 5.5 times normal human height. That would work out to 180-220 feet for a 40 foot tall jumper.
Gorillas are roughly the same height as humans. Though much stronger, they’re also much heavier for their size. The anecdotal accounts I’ve seen on the web indicate that their jumping capability is roughly equivalent to humans’. So Kong could probably make the jump, particularly in a motivated, adrenally elevated state.
A related question is whether the tower could have taken the landing impact. Any takers?
A silverback gorilla scaled up to the size of King Kong would weigh about 66 metric tons. The WTC towers were famously designed to withstand the forces from the impact of a Boeing 707-320, which weighs about 65 metric tons when empty and would presumably be travelling much faster than a jumping gorilla. So the tower might have swayed, and probably would have needed some structural inspection afterwards, but it wouldn’t have fallen.
I love this site, just for wacky questions like this that are answered using great science!
… I did not know that. Seems a little ironic.
It’s a commonly trotted out fact among truthers, who generally ignore that (1) the fully fueled 767’s that hit the Towers were much bigger than 707’s, and (2) even if they were designed on paper to withstand jetliner impact, it’s not as if jetliner impact was actually field tested on the Towers themselves.
Well, they did survive the impact of 767s. There’s something about the thought of 60-some odd tons landing atop a roof, though, that it might not take. It would just seem as though Kong would punch thru that ceiling, and the next, and so forth until he had slown down to the point of stopping. Don’t know how thick the roof was.
[QUOTE=New York Times Magazine]
Wien and his committee charged that the twin towers, with their broader and higher tops, would represent an even greater risk of midair collision. They ran a nearly full-page ad in The Times with an artist’s rendition of a commercial airliner about to ram one of the towers. ‘‘Unfortunately, we rarely recognize how serious these problems are until it’s too late to do anything,’’ the caption said.
The Port Authority was already trying to line up the thousands of tenants it would need to fill the acres of office space in the towers. Such a frightful vision could not be left unchallenged. Robertson says that he never saw the ad and was ignorant of the political battle behind it. Still, he recalls that he addressed the question of an airplane collision, if only to satisfy his engineer’s curiosity. For whatever reason, Robertson took the time to calculate how well his towers would handle the impact from a Boeing 707, the largest jetliner in service at the time. He says that his calculations assumed a plane lost in a fog while searching for an airport at relatively low speed, like the B-25 bomber [which struck the Empire State Building in 1943ish]. He concluded that the towers would remain standing despite the force of the impact and the hole it would punch out. The new technologies he had installed after the motion experiments and wind-tunnel work had created a structure more than strong enough to withstand such a blow.
[/QUOTE]
[my addition]
In other words, during construction one of the building engineers determined that the buildings could stand up to such an impact, but the towers weren’t actually designed to do so, and certainly not at the speeds the 9/11 airliners impacted at (440+ miles per hour, not far off the 767’s normal sustained cruising speed).
In any case, there was no way for them to accurately model the risk of jet fuel fires.
Thanks for the clarification — I looked for a citation for this, but (as you might expect from pravnik’s comment) I couldn’t easily find anything reliable.
I had the same problem. It was annoying looking at all the truther pages pretending they didn’t know the difference between the Boeing 707 (maximum takeoff weight of most common variant in 1975: 267,000 lbs.) and 767 (maximum takeoff weight 300,000 - 350,000 lbs. for the two variants crashed into the towers).
So that’s why Bin Ladin is so hairy.
So if there were a giant treadmill on the roof of each tower, and Kong was in a 707…