My ignorance is due to not understanding the physics involved, as well as other technical factors.
It may very well be that my laymans perception is wrong, and I would like a Doper to say things like
“blah blah’s equation shows what happens when thus and such happens.”
Is asking for knowledge really such a bad thing?
No, I expect someone to answer with specifics like tomndebb did.
Pointing out that planes can and have bounced is a very big step towards giving me concrete facts.
Because I’m not an irrational wacko and when presented with evidence that I can understand I will accept it?
If such an explenation were factually accurate and logically coherent and I could wrap my mind around it? Yes, I would. But that is not what I’m asking for. And that’s certainly not the only thing I would accept.
I’m not going into tinfoil hat territory here.
Doubts do not equal certainties or alternate models.
My specific doubts may very well be based on ignorance, in which case explaining the physical laws involved would clear up my ignorance.
Although, having done more reserach on my own over the last little while, I think it is somewhat accurate to say that the official story may very well be gospel. But no, I am not certain, and I’d appreciate having matters cleared up by someone with a degree.
Even if it’s only so I can understand how a plane can hit a building and produce results like that. The Snopes report doesn’t jive with my, admittedly very limited, understanding of physics, etc… More knowledge could sure clear that up for me.
And sorry Gorillaman, I had planned on spending the rest of the night in bed but my stomach’s hurting too much for that, so I’m back. No deception was intended.
The questions were posed above and I’m not going to repeat them.
However, I was shown by someone else on another message board that there was something I’d forgotten.
There are numerous people who saw the plane go over the highway and/or hit the pentagon.
It was a few years ago, and I’d forgotten that detail.
I am still curious as to why there wouldn’t be more evidence, like bits of the plane, but evidently I’m not going to have my questions answered in GQ.
Final word if I have made or appear to have made any specific suggestions about other models for events, I retract them.
I will endevour to find out about the physics of the crash somewhere else.
Think about this. Planes tend to be made of ratherlightweight metals and mateials. The Pentagon is made of brick and concrete. Imagine what happens when the two come together. I’m actually suprised it went in as far as it did with what in mind. The image that comes to mind is of a soda/beer can full of burning gasoline being slammed into a brick. A lot of damage to the can, not nearly as much to the brick.
The Wings shattered, foldered or broke the moment the fuslage hit the building(did you seriously expect the wings to still be intact?) and the rest probably burnt up rather quickly.
At least one of the photographs on the Snopes page shows plane debris. If you were wondering why there wasn’t more of it, consider that the plane was moving forward at several hundred miles an hour. For there to be pieces on the lawn, they’d have had to bounce off the Pentagon. As it happened, the plane was almost entirely destroyed inside the building, which then partly collapsed and burned, destroying much of the evidence. Something similar might have happeend if the plane had flown into a large cave. The lack of debris outside the cave would be indicative of absolutely nothing. Only if it had crashed in an open area (as the plane in Pennsylvania did) would you see debris strewn across a huge space.
Is that “technical” enough for you? If not, I suspect your ignorance is a product of determination, not doubt.
No, that isn’t technical enough for me, I want to understand the vectors, forces, magnitudes, etc… when a plane crumbles and what a normal debris pattern is like.
And no, my ignorance is a product of not knowing the dense, technical, mathamatical logic. Not knowing the equations. Not having any experience with metalurgy, etc…
In any case, I’m going to unsubscribe to this thread and do some research online.
You are asking way too much from science. An airplane crash is an incredibly complex event. We can’t start from first principles and model something like this. This is the type of event we learn from; now we know what it looks like when an airliner crashes into the ground floor of a reinforced concrete building at full throttle. There is no “normal debris pattern” to compare it to because there has never been a similar accident.
Then why do you think you can spot mistakes in the explanations by snopes and all the posters in this thread?
FinnAgain, if you don’t understand the physics involved, I’m not sure how you can be so doubtful of what happened. If you search this board, you can find other threads where people have raised questions similar to yours and had them answered.
Well, “normal” is exactly what didn’t happen on September 11, 2001. You could gets lots of data on plane crashes and whatnot, but planes don’t often slam into heavily-reinforced buildings, so your gut telling you something is “fishy” is completely useless.
Because even without full knowledge things can ‘seem’ wrong?
And with full knowledge, you can evaluate on a factual basis?
Because I want to get full knoweldge?
Marley23:
Because if you don’t understand the physics involved, it might seem fishy that when you twirl a bucket full of water in a cirlce, the water doesn’t come out.
And thank you, I will search the Dope for more info.
Bryan Ekers Good point and one I’d not considered.
I really am going to leave this thread now.
Honestly, truly.
~grins~
Thanks everybody for the help, I’ll try to educate myself some.
Well, if you want to book some supercomputer time, I suppose you could run a few simulations. I doubt any of them will turn out exactly like Flight 77, though. The crash is simply too complicated an event to predict fine details with any certainty, though nothing about is seems “fishy” in the least.
Ground doesn’t “bruise”. It may become compacted under impact, but the grass over it has some “spring” and rebound. It won’t show damage immediately, although a day or two later there may be some withering and yellowing.
Jet fuel fires are HOT - they generate considerable updrafts that carry smoke, fire, and heat up and away from the ground. Cooler air rushes in from the surrondings. The difference is enough to provide some protection to the grass, which is very short, and doesn’t reach up into lethal heat areas. It’s the same principal that leads to fire fighters crawling along the floor of a burning building rather than walking upright into a blazing room. The lower you are, the cooler it is, the less damage, and the higher the chances of survival.
Because the airplane collapsed on impact.
Airplanes are largely hollow. The wings in particular are hollow, and filled with either air or fuel.
Take an empty beer or soda can out to a sidewalk and set it on the cement. Smash it with your foot. Note that can is squashed into a radically different shape, but the sidewalk suffered little if any damage.
Same principal at work here - the largely aluminum airplane, which was largely hollow, smashed into an object of stone and brick at high speeds. All the hollow spaces in the airplane collapsed as it was compressed by the impact, so it would occupy a much, much smaller volume of space. In this case, the stone and brick did sustain damage… but only the densest, least-hollow parts of the airplane broke through. Like the engine punchin a hole in the wall, engines being rather dense, heavy, and solid. Or, in the case of the fuselage, by the time the fuselage finished compressing and collapsing it formed a solid enough, heavy enough lump to continue through the wall. Airplane wings tend to sheer off in impact accidents. Tree limbs, which are made of wood, of course, can and have sliced off metal airplane wings during crashes. Brick, steel, and stone would put up even more resistance.
Aside from protecting possible human remains from prying eyes, another reason could be to protect possible evidence from further damage while being transported, and to keep pieces from being knocked off or blown about while being carried outside.
It’s evidence in a crime and an attack up on a military asset of the United States of America. The investigating authorities wanted the tapes in their possession as soon as possible not only to analyse them but to guard against any possible damage or tampering.
Because such evidence in most crimes is never made available to the “viewing public” either. Because it’s creepy to want to gawk at the deaths of other people.
I’ve mentioned Concorde already, but I’ll do it again: if you look at the first two photos here, you see what’s left of a plane (plus a building) after a high-impact high-fuel-load crash. Very little. Much of the burning is from the aftermath of fires, in the wooden building with little fire prevention. The pentagon isn’t wooden, and (one would presume) has fairly good sprinkler systems etc.
Because tapes and evidence from ANY plane crash are not normally paraded on TV in the United States. It’s a cultural quirk that, despite our production of Hollywood gorefests like “Kill Bill” the US media (for some unfathomable reason) hesistates to show actual death on TV.
Evidence in a criminal investigation is likewise not normally paraded in public, nor is it returned for years and years, if ever.
The fact it’s a plane crash plus a crime scene only intensifies both effects.
I think it took something like 25 years for Buddy Holly’s widow to get his personal effects after the plane crash that killed him – you’re complaining about something being under wraps for a couple years?
A normal plane crash takes something like six months to two years to analyse… I’m sure there are still people pouring over the wreckage from 9/11/01. If and when the tapes are released it will most likely be to a historical archive of some sort.
Because it’s creepy to see the remains of dead people, which were surely scattered about the site. If it were my relatives I’d prefer NOT to have their charred and baked body parts on CNN - how about you?
Yeah.
The circumstances were a little different… but the US stations declined to show much of the falling, flaming, jumping people that many foreign stations seemed to have no qualms in showing. Again, there’s that reluctance to show actual death on TV. Not always adhered to, but there’s a definite lean in that direction.
Quite a bit of debris was carried out under tarps - excuse me, flags. But really, a LOT of debris was shown leaving the site while covered, but I guess that wasn’t suspicious, was it? Because it was a flag and human debris, right? But any possible evidence that was identified on site as possibly yielding clues to what had happened was carefully moved in a manner to preserve it from further harm
Nope - but I wouldn’t walk barefoot on that lawn.
In that sort of impact things more or less disintegrate. When someone says “fragments” most of what they’re talking about here is NOT large chunks… more like splinters and needle-like shards that, when falling onto a lawn, would easily disappear among the blades of grass. Sort of like what happens if you drop a box of pins on a deep, shag rug. The fragments are small enough to get lost in the shaggy parts.
IF you were standing on the debris site and look down yes, you’d see something, myriad little wisps of stuff, but back away any significant distance it all merges together and all you see is lawn.
Airplanes bounce. Really.
Back in 1996 a Gulfstream IV cartwheeled on take-off at the airport I was based at. Sure, it slid along the pavement and left scorch marks, but every time it hit a bump it bounced into the air and you had an interruption in the black char mark along the ground.
Likewise, when the Pentagon plane hit the ground it bounced back up into the air. Compared ot the overall site, that initial impact ding was relatively small, and the airplane wasn’t on fire when it made that first hit. There would be no burn marks, and if it was just grass there wouldn’t be anything on the ground visibly broken. The scorching wouldn’t start until at least the second impact - which is when it hit the building. Even if they pointed a TV camera at the initial whack-spot, unless you were very famillar with the piece of lawn in question it might not be apparent that anything had happened (until a few days later, when the lawn might start to die off due to crushing injuries to the plants)
When you shoot a bullet into a wall, leaving a hole, where does the bullet go? Quite of bit of it disintegrates and flies in random directions as debris.
In this case, due to the compressive forces of impact, the end result would also be compacted into a much smaller than normal volume.
In addition, the resulting fires would likely burn or melt engine parts (not all parts of an engine are equalling heat and pressure resistant), and having a building collapse on the scene would further crush, compress, distort, and destroy the evidence in question.
Here’s another item - let’s consider those famous airplane black boxes, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders. They are amazingly tough, aren’t they? They get blown up, burned, dunked in salt water oceans, slammed into mountains, and yet remain intact enough to deliver their data. Pretty amazing, huh? Frequently, they survive when the rest of the aircraft doesn’t. Those are some amazingly tough devices, right?
On 9/11, of the four airplanes involved, in three cases the black boxes were destroyed. Not damaged - destroyed. I mean, even they can’t withstand high speed impact AND prolonged fire AND having a massive building dropped on them. If the black boxes didn’t survive intact why is anyone puzzled that hardly anything else did?
The answer to your question is - the engine was still there, in the building, but it was in so many crushed, smashed, and burned pieces it wasn’t recognizable as an engine to the eye anymore.
What a deceptive and completely selective batch of utter nonsense that is presented in that ‘film’. I only got so far before gettgin disgusted. They allege only one ‘hole’ by pointing to a shot fo the pentagon that is almost covered in smoke. The point to intact windows that are hard to tell if they are or are not (even if they are, remember that the Pentagon is built tought). They make a big deal about “undamaged wire spools”, by photographing the side that would not recive any damage and big wire isn’t exactly easily damaged to begin with. Honestly, these guys levels of physics is the same as those lame-ass comedians who quip that they should make the whole plane into the black box.
You want to know why there’s not that much debris? Because planes are light and fragile. Look at when a place hits the ground and realise that the debris field you see, while it make look impressive, is a fraction of the material needed to contrsuct a plane. Such accidents happened when hitting the ground (softer than Pentagon concrete) and are rarely going at top speed. Combine those factors and you’ll be lucky to have bits of the plane left at all.
If it wasn’t the plane that hit the Pentagon, then where did the 4th missing plane go? No big plane parts at the Pentagon? Big deal, did you see big plane parts at the WTC? I rather doubt that there were any recognizable human remains from the plane- if I am not mistaken no bodies from the WTC aircraft were identified earlier, were they? So I think we’ve established that when aircraft strike large buildings, they do not leave large parts or identifiable human remains.
It’s unfortunate that the government confiscated the videos showing the plane hitting the Pentagon. Seeing how we’ve seen the planes hit the WTC hundreds of times, I think we can take seeing the plane hit the Pentagon. In time, the videos will come out. Look how long it took the Zapruder film to be made public.