Re: Four More Years of Murder

From: Laurence Doering (ljd_at_bcpl.net)
Date: 07/30/04 

Date: 30 Jul 2004 18:31:29 GMT

On 30 Jul 2004 03:07:59 -0700, lensman1955 <lensman1955@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Phat Albert Camus <master@mason.snuh> wrote in message news:<Xns9535B71BB265Fspamspamsnuhspam33@207.14.113.17>...
>> lensman1955@hotmail.com (lensman1955) wrote in
>> news:633b063b.0407290425.5f6b5288@posting.google.com:
>> > I asked (re; Pentagon) what people expected the wings to do? Drop off
>> > outside the building a la the James Bond movie "Live and Let Die" or
>> > leave little wing shaped holes in reinforced granite.
>>
>> No, that is your stock reply. It is the stock reply of many Pentagon
>> story defenders. Almost a trademark of the debunker who has exhausted his
>> limited bag of tricks.
>>
>> > I never got an
>> > answer, I was just told I was being stupid for thinking the wings
>> > could crumble up and be dragged into the building.
>>
>> Can you explain the physics of these wings disappearing into this tiny
>> hole? It seems to me, if they struck the wall, the last thing they could
>> possibly do is "crumble up and be dragged inside the building".
>
> This is my understanding, and I'll type slowly so you can follow
> along. (Yes, that was deliberate.)
>
> The nose of the plane punches a hole in the wall. As the base of the
> wings reaches the wall, there's more surface area and less structural
> strength to the wings than there is to the nose so the wings are
> unable to punch through the wall. Taking the path of least resistance,
> they crumble back into the fuselage and are dragged into the hole.
>
> If there's something wrong with that idea, let me know what it is and
> what you think _should_ have happened to the wings.

The problem with the idea of the wings "crumbling back into the
fuselage" is that it accepts at face value the "No 757 Hit The
Pentagon, You Idiot" peoples' claim that the hole in the
Pentagon's exterior wall was relatively small.

In fact, the hole in the Pentagon's outer wall was about 120 feet
wide. AA 77 struck the wall at an angle of about 45 degrees, so
the 120-foot wide hole was caused by the penetration of something
over a width of about 90 feet perpendicular to the aircraft's
flight path before impact. This is almost three-quarters of
the 124-foot wingspan of a Boeing 757.

A large proportion of a fully-loaded 757's mass can be found
in the wing center section, including the engines, central
wing spar structure, main landing gear, and fuel in the
fuel tanks.

The answer to Jason's question is that AA 77's wings didn't
"disappear into this tiny hole". The wing center section
and fuselage made a 120-foot wide hole. The outermost
sections of the aircraft's wings fragmented against the
Pentagon's facade, leaving scars on the limestone facing
that are shown in some of the photographs in the ASCE report.

But, Jason says, a 757's engines are, like, 10 feet wide
or something. How could an engine penetrate the wall without
totally destroying the concrete support columns that were
left hanging (severed at the bottom, as if they had been
struck by something about the width of an airliner's wing)
on the right side of the hole?

Here's how. The columns were on 10-foot centers, so there's
slightly more than a 9 foot gap between them. The widest
part of a Rolls-Royce RB211 is the fan, which is about 7
feet in diameter. However, the fan and fan shroud are
relatively lightweight compared to the rest of the engine,
and would most likely have been converted into lots of
tiny bits of shrapnel on impact.

The massive parts of the RB211 that would penetrate 5 inches
of limestone facing and 10 inches of brick infill are the
shafts and the compressor and turbine hubs, which are in
the core of the engine. Unlike the fan, the core of the
engine is less than three feet in diameter.

It's not all that hard to imagine how something 3 feet wide
could fit through a 9-foot gap.

ljd

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